'A Tupperware of Ashes' review – Meera Syal gives a titanic performance in this powerful dementia drama

Read our review of new family play A Tupperware of Ashes, written by Tanika Gupta, now in performances at the National Theatre to 16 November.

There are few diseases crueller than dementia and Tanika Gupta’s new play A Tupperware of Ashes, which stars Meera Syal (whose own parents suffered from it), explores its effects on one British-Indian family. Every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way, and here cultural differences and intergenerational trauma make carrying out sensitive decisions all the more fraught.

Queenie Mukherjee is 68 and ought be in her prime. She is the first Asian restaurateur to hold a Michelin Star, the recipient of a MBE, and she’s about to become a grandmother for the first time. Her three grown-up children Raj (Raj Bajaj), Gopal (Marc Elliott) and Kamala (Natalie Dew) are an English teacher, lawyer and doctor respectively and she has means. However it hasn’t all been plain sailing, due to the struggle of life in the UK as an immigrant and the premature death of her husband and “soulmate” Ameet (“I hate the word ‘widow’”, she says) 20 years earlier.

The usually pin-sharp Queenie has started burning rice, anticipating things that happened months ago, and talking to Ameet, and she’s finally persuaded to see a doctor (there’s the privilege of Kamala being in the system and knowing how to jump the NHS queues on her mother’s behalf). Her symptoms worsen and her life becomes more restricted. “It sounds like the menopause,” notes the wry Shobna Gulati as family friend Indrani.

It could be unrelentingly bleak – and it doesn’t hold back in showing just how debilitating the disease is and how the pandemic robbed countless families of the chance to say goodbye to loved ones – but it’s a highly watchable piece given the subject matter. The tone is remarkably well-balanced with the right amount of light and shade and culturally specific jokes that have universal resonance.

Pooja Ghai’s poetic and painterly production is accentuated by Matt Haskins’s lighting and composition by Nitin Sawhney, plus designer Rosa Maggiora’s peacock-blue seascape.

As Queenie, Syal is, well, regal, with a “Queen Lear”-esque outburst that concludes the first half. Her combination of charm and talent makes it apparent how she had such success in business, and she’s also in possession of a sharp tongue that has clearly been capable of great cruelty before her illness, particularly towards Raj and his unseen wife.

She seems to have always had a tendency to embroider the truth, plus (as one of her children puts it) a severe case of “Asian mother emotional blackmail” that’s both amusing and frustrating for her offspring, who only seem to be able to tolerate her in small doses.

There are some details that don’t ring true. A family with money wouldn’t go to a Citizens Advice Bureau to sort out power of attorney, and the presence of Ameet in Queenie’s version of reality can feel contrived, although Zubin Varla provides a rich voice and comforting presence as the spectre of the intellectual to whom she devoted her life.

In the final sequence, we travel to India post-pandemic, where the River Ganges has become dangerously polluted thanks to industrialism and all the human remains scattered each year, and the ceremony for the scattering of ashes has almost become kitsch, so it’s up to the family to afford it dignity. This is an arresting piece of work that would be deserving of a larger audience in the Lyttleton.

A Tupperware of Ashes is at the National Theatre to 16 November.

Photo credit: A Tupperware of Ashes (Photos by Manuel Harlan)