There are quibbles with Tanika Gupta’splay, which tracks its protagonist Queenie’s (Meera Syal) traumatic decline into the pits of Alzheimer’s disease. But, almost all of them seem trivial when hit with its eventually potent effect that feels like a knife has been dug into your soul and twisted.
On the surface, Gupta’s play is a tense family drama that gets its beginnings from King Lear. Queenie is a steely, Michelin star-awarded restaurant owner, who moved to England from Calcutta. She and her three children squabble and bicker after years of unresolved disagreements but, when Queenie is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, their whole world is toppled into confusion. “It feels like the world is changing,” Queenie says.
Her journey to diagnosis is predictable but no less devastating. She starts by forgetting things: she leaves rice on the stove too long and blanks out the names of her children’s partners. Visions of her husband and “soulmate”, Ameet (Zubin Varla), who died 20 years ago, start to crawl back into her life. In a searing production directed by Pooja Ghai, Queenie’s inner thoughts are coaxed out and projected across the stage. As she takes her prescribed drugs, she is trapped in stasis. Aided by an alchemical score by Nitin Sawhney, voices are drowned out to become hazy. Sharp streaks of light that fly across long wires show Queenie’s brain capacities breaking down.
Syal shatteringly embodies Queenie, her movements gradually changing with each scene. From the family’s resolute matriarch, she shrinks into a dormant curl. The disease swallows her physicality and mind, with explosions of extreme cruelty falling out of her uncontrollably. “I wish I aborted you,” she snarls at her oldest son, Raj (Raj Bajaj). And yet Gupta ensures there is humour, hope and playfulness flowing underneath. The production relies on magic tricks: mangoes appear from thin air, costume changes happen in a flash, all of which seem almost entirely inconceivable.
The production, then, has an enchanted centre. But, Gupta’s writing is topical, too. NHS wait times and the UK’s broken health system run as a subsidiary arm to the narrative, as well as the heartbreak of not being able to visit loved ones during the Covid pandemic. References to blood-bound, family duty will be recognisible to anyone who has grown up in a south Asian household. But, tradition is not purely presented, it is challenged, too.
The play lays out a plethora of culturally specific complications, generational differences and big unanswerable questions, which are realistically left untied. The final scene though is spoiled by its secrets being given away in the title. A shame, as otherwise this is an arresting picture of the ripple-effect of a dementia diagnosis and the heavy grief that follows.
• At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 16 November
