There are distinct shades of King Lear in Tanika Gupta’s new play at the National Theatre. Meera Syal plays Queenie, a powerful matriarch and owner of a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London. When she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she divides her assets between her three children – who she also expects to let her live with them in turn. However, this reopens wounds that have never truly healed since the loss of her husband and their father.
Syal brings Queenie vividly to life, aided by Gupta avoiding the trap of the ‘saintly sufferer’. She’s fiercely proud and quick to cut her children down with her words. As her condition worsens and her sense of time begins to dislocate, the glimpses of her early years in Calcutta and her memories of the racism she faced when arriving in the UK add a greater poignancy to the loss of the life she has fought to forge.
Queenie’s decline dominates the first two thirds of Pooja Ghai’s production. Music maestro Nitin Sawhney’s compositions fleetingly evoke both her heritage and the increasing jangle of her mind. Illusions director and designer John Bulleid employs some neat visual flourishes to capture the experience of her sudden time lapses, although these sometimes distract from the story.
The blank backdrop of Rosa Maggiora’s set from the outset has the effect of isolating all the characters prematurely, in spite of some dynamic lighting design by Matt Haskins. Looking a little like a Cy Twombly painting, its appearance and purpose only truly start to make sense quite late on, when sections threading across it begin to pulse and flash like the misfiring neurons in Queenie’s brain. We lose something of the encroaching impact of her Alzheimer’s. She’s already stranded by the set design.
The Lear-ness of it all also compacts the rest of the family’s relationships into a final international road trip that feels rushed – as if Shakespeare had decided to bolt on a few scenes about Goneril, Regan and Cordelia shouting at each other after their father’s death. Queenie’s kids have to info-dump their grievances into some pretty blocky speeches. An anguished Raj Bajaj fairs the best. He gets the strongest through-line as the first-born, black sheep of the family.
That said, this production still hits some powerful emotional beats as Queenie disappears into herself. There’s also an impish turn from Zubin Varla as Ameet, her dead husband, who she imagines speaking to her as her sense of reality fades. This lightens proceedings but importantly, along with some entertainingly filthy language, also captures the vibrancy and energy of her life and history.
