Meera Syal and Tanika Gupta’s friendship clearly runs deep. They nod in recognition to each other’s anecdotes and speak about being part of the Asian Women Writers’ Collective in the 1990s, when it was a far smaller world for British south Asian writers and actors. So it is not surprising that just before Syal was due to meet the National Theatre’s outgoing director, Rufus Norris, for an ideas meeting, she called on Gupta for anything she might offer him.
“How about you doing Queen Lear?” suggested Gupta, a playwright with a history of adapting the classics, who had transposed Shakespeare’s drama, putting an imperious mother at its centre. Syal phoned Gupta six hours later to say: “He’s up for it.”
Queen Lear has since morphed into Queenie, the central character of A Tupperware of Ashes, now at the National’s Dorfman theatre, with music by Nitin Sawhney. Syal plays a modern-day British Bengali matriarch who runs a Michelin-starred restaurant and, at 68 years old, is diagnosed with early onset dementia. Her three grown children watch her alarming decline.
Syal and Gupta are sitting in a back room of the National, along with Shobna Gulati, who plays Queenie’s old friend, Indrani. They talk intimately about the resilience of their own mothers – about getting to know hidden aspects of their immigrant experiences later in life, writing down their recipes, speaking of their difficult sides and watching them slowly, painfully, get ill and die.
Syal and Gulati’s mothers died after suffering from dementia; Gupta’s died from cancer and, towards the end, showed signs of confusion, she says. “A lot of our friends of a certain age were going through a similar thing with our parents,” she adds.
The play is infused with a depth of lived experience as a result. Even the snippet of a scene I watch in rehearsals is highly charged, voices wobbling with emotion, including that of director Pooja Ghai, who recently worked with Gupta on The Empress staged by the RSC.
Has it hit raw nerves? There has been quite a lot of crying, says Gupta, but for Gulati it has been “reassuring and cathartic”. It’s the same for Syal: “My mum died barely a year ago and I thought when I looked at the play ‘This is either going to make me or break me’,” she says. Thankfully, it did the former: “I think it might save me years of therapy. And I do feel the authenticity you can bring to it is worth so much. You want to reach out to the people going through it, to say ‘I’m with you, let’s hold each other’.”
Gulati speaks of “finding another family” in these women. And it is not often you get your hands on a script in which its central characters are fierce and formidable women, she says, and in which so much of the company are strong middle-aged women too.
A Tupperware of Ashes dramatises a generation that came to Britain to make new lives, and push their children towards greater opportunities and freedoms. “It was that pioneering generation of women and men who came here and went through so much for us. They were these massive personalities so when they go, what do they leave? It’s like a big hole. The play is a love story to that generation, without it being obviously so.”
If they were a pioneering generation, so are these three. Gulati, a stage and screen dancer-actor, has featured in such revered TV series as Victoria Wood’s sitcom dinnerladies and Coronation Street; Syal broke barriers with her comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, and Gupta’s plays have been staged across the nation, as well as on radio.
As performers, Gulati and Syal felt like they were among the first flowering of a generation on screen and stage. “Definitely. It felt like a movement,” says Syal. What hasn’t been dramatised as much, or even spoken about, is the racism that their parents faced, and that they saw growing up themselves. “It’s interesting that we haven’t really spoken about it, or if we have, it’s been [only] amongst ourselves – all of it, even what happened in the [most recent] riots,” says Gulati. “I don’t think they [the younger generation] realise how much people fought and how much we have laid the ground.”
The play reflects a south Asian experience of dementia in some of the judgments that Queenie’s children face among the community. That resonates with Syal. “Didn’t you get that from people?” she asks the other two. “I did, without them even knowing the circumstances … I’d think ‘How dare you, do you know the pain that we’re in?’”
Her father went to live in care after being sectioned “so he didn’t have a choice … He had Capgras syndrome – he thought my mum had been replaced by a stranger. That was very painful for a couple that spent 60 years together and were so devoted. For my mother it was heartbreaking, she never got over it, really.”
But there is a reason why some are circumspect about residential care, suggests Gulati. “I think the fear is because [many] homes are not built for our communities and that they’re going to be isolated and on their own. After having the experience of coming here, then building your families, your memories, your everything, and then suddenly to be pushed into a place where you have to start again … I don’t think it’s necessarily a stigma of the home. It’s that [an elderly Asian parent] is once again the only brown person in a white space.”
Syal agrees: so much of the nostalgia and celebration in these spaces is about Vera Lynn and the first world war rather than Partition and Bollywood singer Mohammed Rafi.
The play has sparks of humour and levity but does not steer away from dark territory, including harrowing aspects of dementia, family fracture and bereavement. “That’s what stage plays should be about,” says Gupta. “It’s about really trying to go there with emotions. I often feel very happy when I go into the toilets in the interval, listening to people’s conversations, and if they’re vomiting or crying I’ve done my job. Excellent.”
There are glances at a care system that is dangerously over-stretched. “What we are going through at the moment in this country is massive turbulence around the NHS, health care and social care,” says Gupta. “It’s what’s happening every day – people whose parents are getting ill are having to look after them because they can’t afford to put them into care or even get a carer.”
Syal recently bumped into her mother’s former carer while on a day off from rehearsals, at a local garden centre. It was lovely to see her over the potted plants, she says. “In the midst of all the pain, I was just astonished by the amount of human kindness I came across from carers who were being paid nothing and away from their own families a lot of the time. They’re looking after your parents and they’re away from their parents. It’s kind of incredible. They deserve so much more than we give them.”
There were discoveries late in the day for all three that shed new light on their mothers. Gulati covered some of this ground in her 2020 book, Remember Me? Discovering My Mother As She Lost Her Memory. She is still looking through her mother’s stuff: “Oh my goodness – there’s so many things I didn’t know … We only discover our mothers as women when they’re on their journey away from us. We only then recognise – or I certainly did – that these women were the linchpin of the whole family,” she says.
“When she was towards the end of her life,” says Gupta of her own mother, “she told me stuff that I didn’t even know about. She talked about racism in the 1960s – of being attacked in the street, having her sari pulled off her, being called [racist names]. I’d never heard any of this. I’m not sure if she had been ashamed of it [before] – as if it were her shame. I found that really painful.”
Syal inherited notebooks or diaries her mother kept during Syal’s father’s dementia. “She writes down what happened every day for six years – how he was that day, what he ate, whether he recognised her. I thought ‘I must read them for research but I actually can’t. It’s immensely painful.’”
She pauses, and then continues: “There is an African saying, ‘Every time an elder dies a library burns down.’ That’s how I feel about them going.”
• A Tupperware of Ashes is at the National Theatre, London, until 16 November
