From Lear stripping off in the storm, to André, in Florian Zeller’s The Father, lamenting “I’m losing all my leaves”, drama has powerfully portrayed the heartbreaking destruction of dementia. Now it’s the turn of Queenie in Tanika Gupta’s immensely poignant new play: a brilliant, tough Bengali matriarch (movingly portrayed by Meera Syal) whose fierce dismissal of her adult children’s concerns over her increasing forgetfulness is rapidly undermined by the onset of Alzheimer’s.
It’s a painful subject, but theatre is a great space to discuss it. Here story can offer companionship to affected audience members and bridge the gap between the outside world and the world of the mind.
Gupta deftly feels her way along this tightrope. As Zeller does with The Father, she uses stagecraft to bring us into Queenie’s experience. But while Zeller deploys confusing shifts in time and character to express the disorientation of dementia, here Queenie’s experience is more varied. Certainly it’s grim. There is shock and bewilderment as Queenie, owner of a successful Michelin-starred restaurant in London, suddenly realises that she is planning for an event that took place months earlier. Then there’s denial and rage as she refuses to accept what’s happening. Finally there is terrifying confusion as her grip of who and where she is disintegrates.
But although the play is unflinchingly honest, there are also sharp shafts of humour and solace in the elision between memory and reality. Queenie’s long-deceased husband Ameet comes to visit her — episodes that we, like she, experience just as vividly as everything going on around her in the present day. As we skip back to Queenie’s early married life in Calcutta, we see her as she was: clever, passionate, determined. These scenes are often suffused with warmth, but Zubin Varla also makes Ameet an ambivalent figure as he coaxes Queenie to plunge with him into the sea of oblivion.
Pooja Ghai’s fluid staging guides us through this seesawing landscape, with Rosa Maggiora’s subtly lit, stratified backdrop rippling with blue like the sea, glowing red like the sunset, or flashing like electrical brain impulses. We see what Queenie sees but also what her distressed children (Raj Bajaj, Natalie Dew and Marc Elliott) witness as they cope with her volatile mood swings and sometimes deeply hurtful behaviour.
There are many references to Lear, not least in the painful issue of who should look after the ailing parent — a question that highlights both clashing cultural expectations and the current crisis in care for the elderly. A desolate scene, with the family standing outside Queenie’s care home window mid-pandemic, reminds us of how many died, isolated, at that time. Stephen Fewell’s lovely performance as a gentle carer pays quiet tribute to this critical workforce.
It’s a play that tries to cover a few too many areas, but it’s honest, tender and moving. Syal is superb: an indomitable spirit to begin with, she dwindles before our eyes into a silent, crumpled shell. But she, Gupta and Ghai leave us with a version of rebirth, an image of Queenie in her prime. It’s a potent reminder that inside every frail elder is stacked a whole life: a person still to be cherished.
★★★★☆
To November 16, nationaltheatre.org.uk
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