An intense play about losing loved ones to the disease Alzheimer's.
The main character Queenie (Meera Syall) is a restauranteur, a widow and the mother of three. She is the proud owner of the only Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London and runs it with the same intensity and dedication with which she (attempts to) run the lives of her children. Once she is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, we are on a one way road to the end, her ashes ending in Calcutta where she was born.
The play riffs off King Lear: family relationships oscillating around the demise of the central character. But it also shoots you into the heart of life with (or under) a certain type of Indian matriarch. Her acerbic wit is only outdone by her cruel putdowns. She has a son she almost seems to enjoy torturing, while the other two have learnt how to keep out of her firing range. What goes from placating her in the early days of the disease moves to managing her, failing to manage her and finally putting her in full-time care. The children's pain and helplessness is visceral.
Throughout the play, the (dead) husband (Zubin Varla) is present. For Queenie, he is her soulmate, and it is beautifully done. He flies around the stage like a little kid, begging her to loosen up, to play, to have adventures, appealing to her sense of fun, refusing to accept situations that are 'boring' and showing us another side of the woman, possibly before she grew old. As her disease takes her, so does this 'ghost' until she ends up entirely in his world.
The play is linear. It starts with the first sign of memory loss (burnt pans / forgetting the rice) and ends with the scattering of ashes. But what this allows is a play that can go deeper rather than wider. Other subject matters include NHS waiting times, the horrendous isolation for the elderly during COVID, horrific '60s racism towards immigrants and Indian British identity for those born in London but growing up with a different cultural backdrop.
It's a harrowing play, the Bengali girl next to me, married to a Punjabi as am I, was in tears. The first half is better than the second, simply because it is faster paced, funnier and more entertaining. The second is harrowing and unsettling and, by the end, we were both just incredibly sad. Meera Syall plays it beautifully; watching her physically and mentally crumple before our eyes was deeply moving.
The set design (Matt Haskins) is superb: at one moment seaside vistas, then to jagged lines, like the loss of synapses in Queenie's brain. The music score is also stunning; Nitin Sawhney has created a deeply moving soundtrack that fits the script perfectly. There are also moments of literal magic (John Bulleid): mangoes plucked from thin-air.
All in all, impossible not to be moved.