Writer: Tanika Gupta
Director: Pooja Ghai
Tanika Gupta’s latest play started as an idea to adapt King Lear with a woman in the title role. But although that heritage is still visible in places – Meera Syal’s matriarch is known to all as Queenie, and she has three children with whom she has varying degrees of relationship – A Tupperware of Ashes has thankfully, majestically even, transmuted into something far more than a mere retread of Shakespeare could ever hope for.
This modern-day tale sees Queenie, a Michelin-starred chef who has carved out a reputation for elevating Bengali cuisine and a woman who relishes being in control, starting to have moments of forgetfulness. After she is diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she fights to organise her life and future care even as her grasp on reality begins to waver.
Gupta and director Pooja Ghal illustrate what life is like from inside Queenie’s head, as her dead husband Ameet (Zubin Varla) begins to intrude on her consciousness. While Queenie’s decline is sad to watch, there is also joy there, as she begins to reconnect with the man she had lost some 20 years earlier. Some stage magic is also used to great effect – Queenie’s best friend Indrani (Shobna Gulati) has an impressive onstage quick change, one of Varla’s impromptu exits is surreal and jaw-dropping, and Syal herself manages to pluck full-size mangoes out of thin air in an act of reminiscence.
But it is the decline in health that is to the fore here. The toll it takes on Queenie’s three children as they struggle to keep their mother safe is palpable. It’s also shaped by a generational shift in attitudes towards families. Queenie is of the belief that it is children’s primary duty to take care of their parents when the parents can no longer take care of themselves, just as she and Ameet did for her mother-in-law. But Raj, Komola and Gopal, born and raised in Britain, know that the care Queenie needs isn’t anything they can provide.
The clash between wanting to honour their mother’s wishes and having to go against them in selling her beloved house so that they can afford the residential care she needs brings added dimensions to a play that catalogues the effect of dementia on both sufferers and their loved ones with such tenderness. That’s also reflected in Nitin Sawhney’s score for the play, the composer’s trademark fusion of Asian and British sounds always shifting in and out of phase in concert with the fluidity of Queenie’s degrading mind.
A couple of lines in Act 1 point to Queenie’s dementia diagnosis occurring at some point in the audience’s relative past. The second act makes it clear why: not long after settling into a long-term care home, the Covid pandemic hits. After deciding to move their mother into professional care, the children – Raj Bajaj, Natalie Dew and Marc Elliott – suddenly find themselves unable even to meet the woman who raised them.
That whole sequence combines Queenie’s own struggle with her new living arrangements – the wipe-clean, high-backed chair is something old people would use, and not her; the daily menu contains the sort of bland fare that Syal and her Goodness Gracious Me colleagues once lambasted in their classic “going out for an English” sketch.
But throughout it all, Syal delivers a performance that reminds us that however much of Queenie disappears from other people’s encounters with her, what made her the wrong beloved matriarch remains inside. It is in her final moments that Bajaj, as the eldest son who has always had a fractious relationship with the mother who doted on his younger siblings, really comes into his own. His quest for answers, embarked upon so late that the woman who could provide them has all but gone, adds yet more heartbreak to a tragic situation.
The story continues once Queenie is finally reunited with Ameet. The children’s quest to fulfil their mother’s last wish, that her cremated remains be dispersed in the Ganges river, touches upon both the bureaucracy involved and the highly polluted nature of what is supposed to be the holiest of waterways. It is here that A Tupperware of Ashes takes on the traits of Queenie’s children: without their mother around, they are competent but flailing, and Gupta’s script exhibits the same characteristics.
But even though Queenie’s body is gone, her spirit does remain. So, too, Meera Syal’s performance remains in the memory long after her character departs – and after the lights go down. A Tupperware of Ashes has crafted a formidable character, and one that will be remembered.
Continues until 16 November 2024
