The actress stars in a new play at the National Theatre about dementia, a subject that is close to home
Family has always been important to Meera Syal. You can see that in her groundbreaking British-Asian sitcom The Kumars at No 42, which made her a household name, with its fondly humorous take on the generations.
“My childhood was pretty idyllic,” she says as we sit in the National Theatre during her lunch break from rehearsals of a new play, A Tupperware of Ashes. She grew up in a mining village close to Walsall in the West Midlands with her father, who worked as an accountant, her mother, a teacher, and her younger brother — and wrote about growing up there in her 1996 novel Anita and Me. “I was allowed to be wild, free and imaginative and spend hours riding my bike. I don’t think I would have ended up doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t lived there.”
A Tupperware of Ashes has led Syal to reflect on the “incredibly close” relationship she had with her parents. The play is about a family coping with dementia, which both of her parents had. Syal plays Queenie, the matriarch of a “slightly dysfunctional family”, who finds out she has early-onset dementia….