Actors Meera Syal and Shobna Gulati, with playwright Tanika Gupta, explain how their National Theatre production springs from the anguish of losing their mothers
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…