MThe friendship between Syal and Tanika Gupta clearly runs deep. They nod in recognition of each other’s anecdotes and tell them that they are part of the Collective of Asian women writers in the 1990s, when it was a much smaller world for British South Asian writers and actors. So it is not surprising that just before Syal was due to meet the outgoing director of the National Theater, Rufus Norris, for an ideas meeting, he appealed to Gupta for all she had to offer him.
“How about doing Queen Lear?” suggested Gupta, a playwright with a history of adapting classics, who had transformed Shakespeare’s drama and placed an imperious mother at its center. Syal called Gupta six hours later to say, “He’s ready.”
Queen Lear has since been transformed into Queenie, the central character of A Tupperware of Ashes, now at National’s Dorfman Theatre, with music by Nitin Sawhney. Syal plays a modern British-Bengali matriarch who runs a Michelin-starred restaurant and is diagnosed with dementia at the age of 68. Her three adult children see her alarming decline.
Syal and Gupta sit in a back room at the National, along with Shobna Gulati, who plays Queenie’s old friend Indrani. They talk intimately about the resilience of their own mothers – about learning hidden aspects of their immigrant experiences later in life, writing down their prescriptions, sharing their difficult sides and watching them slowly and painfully fall ill and die .
Syal and Gulati’s mothers died after suffering from dementia; Gupta died of cancer and showed signs of confusion toward the end, she says. “Many of our friends of a certain age have gone through the same thing with our parents,” she adds.
The piece is therefore imbued with a depth of lived experience. Even the clip of a scene I watch during rehearsals is highly charged, with voices wobbling with emotion, including that of director Pooja Ghai, who recently worked with Gupta on The Empress, staged by the RSC.
Did it touch sensitive nerves? There was a fair amount of crying, says Gupta, but for Gulati it was “reassuring and cathartic.” The same goes for Syal: “My mother died barely a year ago and when I watched the play I thought, ‘This is going to make or break me,'” she says. Fortunately, the former happened: ‘I think it could save me years of therapy. And I think the authenticity you can bring to it is worth so much. You want to to reach the people who are going through this, to say: ‘I’m with you, let’s hold each other’.”
Gulati speaks of “finding another family” with these women. And it’s not often that you get your hands on a script in which the main characters are fierce and formidable women, she says, and in which a large part of the cast is also strong, middle-aged women.
A Tupperware of Ashes dramatizes a generation who came to Britain to build a new life and push their children towards greater opportunities and freedoms. “It was that pioneering generation of women and men who came here and experienced so much for us. They were huge personalities, so what do they leave behind when they leave? It’s like a big hole. The play is a love story for that generation, without obviously being so.”
If they were a groundbreaking generation, so are these three. A stage and screen dancer-actor, Gulati has appeared in respected TV series such 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 performed across the country and on radio.
As performers, Gulati and Syal felt like they were among the first of a generation on screen and stage. “Definitely. It felt like a movement,” says Syal. What hasn’t been dramatized as much, or even talked about, is the racism that their parents faced and that they saw growing up. “It’s interesting that we haven’t really talked about it, or if we have, it’s only been between us – everything, even what happened during the (most recent) riots,” Gulati says. “I don’t think they (the younger generation) realize how many people fought and how much we laid the foundation.”
The play reflects a South Asian experience of dementia in some of the judgments Queenie’s children face in the community. That resonates with Syal. “Didn’t you get that from people?” she asks the other two. “I did that, without them even knowing the circumstances… I would think, ‘How dare you, do you know the pain we are in?’”
Her father went to live in a care facility after he was taken away, “so he had no choice… He had Capgras syndrome – he thought my mother had been replaced by a stranger. That was very painful for a couple who had been together for sixty years and were so committed. It was heartbreaking for my mother, she never actually got over it.”
But there’s a reason some are cautious when it comes to residential care, Gulati suggests. “I think the fear comes from the fact that (many) houses are not built for our communities and that they will be isolated and on their own. After having the experience of coming here, then building your family, your memories, your everything, and then suddenly being thrust into a place where you have to start over… I don’t think that’s necessarily a stigma of the house . It’s that (an older Asian parent) is once again the only brown person in a white room.”
Syal agrees: 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 a touch of humor and levity, but does not deviate from dark territory, including poignant aspects of dementia, family breakdown and grief. “That’s what plays should be about,” says Gupta. “It’s about really trying to go there with emotions. I often feel very happy when I go to the toilets at recess and listen to people’s conversations, and if they throw up or cry, I have done my job. Excellent.”
There are glimpses into a healthcare system that is dangerously overloaded. “What we are experiencing in this country at the moment is enormous turbulence around the NHS, health and social care,” says Gupta. “It’s what happens every day: People whose parents get sick have to take care of them because they can’t afford to put them in care or even get a caregiver.”
Syal recently ran into her mother’s former caregiver while on a day off from rehearsals at a local garden center. It was wonderful to see her among the potted plants, she says. “Amid all the pain, I was simply amazed at the amount of human kindness I encountered from caregivers who were paid nothing and often away from their own families. They take care of your parents and are away from their parents. It’s quite incredible. They deserve so much more than we give them.”
For all three, discoveries occurred late in the day that shed new light on their mothers. Gulati addressed some of this topic in her 2020 book, Remember Me? Discovering my mother when she lost her memory. She still goes through her mother’s things: “Oh my God – there are so many things I didn’t know… We only discover our mothers as women when they travel away from us. Only then do we recognize – and I certainly did – that these women were the lifeblood of the entire family,” she says.
“When she was near the end of her life,” Gupta says of her own mother, “she told me things I didn’t even know about. She talked about racism in the 1960s – about being attacked in the street, having her sari ripped off, being called names (racist names). I had never heard anything about this before. I’m not sure if she was ashamed of it (before) – as if she was her shame. I found that really painful.”
Syal inherited notebooks and diaries that her mother kept during Syal’s father’s dementia. “Every day for six years she wrote down what happened – how he was that day, what he ate, whether he recognized her. I thought, ‘I have to read them for research, but that’s not really possible. It’s extremely painful.’”
She pauses for a moment 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.”