[4] On New Year's Day 1975, Archie Jones, a 47-year-old Englishman whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him, attempts to take his own life by gassing himself in his car when a chance interruption causes him to change his mind.

Filled with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin and then finds his way into the aftermath of a New Year's Eve party.

Archie and Clara are soon married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to be intelligent but with low self-confidence due to her weight and insecurity about her mixed-race identity.

Archie and Samad met in 1945 when they were part of a tank crew inching through Europe in the final days of World War II, though they missed out on the action.

Their friendship was cemented when Archie, acting at Samad's behest, apparently executed an escaped Nazi scientist whom they had been tasked with turning over to the authorities.

Samad is a downtrodden waiter in a West End curry house, and is obsessed by the history of his supposed but unlikely great-grandfather, Mangal Pandey, a Hindu soldier from Uttar Pradesh, not Bengal, who is famous for firing the first shot of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (though he missed and was executed).

Samad in particular finds it difficult to maintain his devotion to Islam in an English life; he is continually tormented by what he sees as the effects of this cultural conflict upon his own moral character—his Muslim values are corrupted by his compulsive masturbation, beer drinking, and his affair with his children's music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones.

In an attempt to preserve his traditional beliefs, he sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope that he will grow up properly under the teachings of Islam.

Millat, meanwhile, pursues a rebellious path of womanising, drinking and petty hooliganism—as well as harbouring a love of mob movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas.

Angry at his people's marginalisation in English society, Millat demonstrates against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989 and eventually pledges himself to a militant Muslim fundamentalist brotherhood known as "Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation" (KEVIN).

The lives of the Joneses and Iqbals intertwine with that of the white, middle-class Chalfens, a lapsed Jewish-Catholic family of Oxbridge-educated intellectuals who typify a distinctive strain of North London liberal trendiness, and who are recruited by Irie and Millat's school to tutor them after the pair are caught smoking marijuana.

The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a university lecturer and geneticist working on a controversial 'FutureMouse' project in which he introduces chemical carcinogens into the body of a mouse and is thus able to observe the progression of a tumour in living tissue.

By re-engineering the actual genome and watching cancers progress at pre-determined times, Marcus believes he is eliminating the random.

To some extent, the Chalfen family provides a safe haven as they (believe themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives of Irie, Magid, and Millat.

Meanwhile, after his return from Bangladesh, Magid works as Marcus's research assistant on the FutureMouse project, while Millat becomes further involved in KEVIN.

The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN, Joshua and FATE, and Clara's mother Hortense and the Jehovah's Witnesses all plan to demonstrate their opposition to Marcus's FutureMouse—which they view as an evil interference with their own religious and ethical beliefs—at its exhibition on New Year's Eve 1992.

Mickey opens up the previously men-only O'Connell's pub to women, and Archie and Samad finally invite their wives along with them to celebrate the new millennium.

Clara Jones, née Bowden, was an awkward, unpopular Jehovah's Witness who spent her adolescence canvassing door-to-door.

Magid is fascinated by the certainty of fate genetic engineering offers, and by having the power to choose another creature's path, as his was chosen for him.

His controversial FutureMouse experiment involves genetically altering a mouse so that it develops cancers at specific times and sites.

Originally interested in his studies at Glenard Oak School, Joshua rebels against the Chalfens (particularly his father) by joining the animal-rights groups FATE.

Directed by the venue's Artistic Director Indhu Rubasingham, the production featured 13 original songs by Paul Englishby and starred Tony Jayawardena as Samad, Richard Lumsden as Archie and Ayesha Antoine as Irie.