I am all for plays having tantalising titles, but the name of this new work from Tanika Gupta constitutes more than something of a plot spoiler. It is just one of the myriad elements that misfire, that strain for gravitas yet fail to achieve it. A Tupperware of Ashes struggles to coalesce into something with overarching impact and serves as a salutary reminder that having a character say a line and having an audience believe it are always two very different things.
“You have revolutionised Indian cuisine in this country,” says omnipresent best friend Indrani (Shobna Gulati) to Queenie (Meera Syal), who is apparently a Michelin-starred chef. Yet the grit, the texture, the lived experience behind the career in this statement are entirely lacking and the play continues in this uninspired and uninspiring way. Queenie is the matriarch of a British-Indian family, a widow with three grown-up children and, at the age of 65 after a series of denials and narrowly averted disasters, she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s .
At this juncture, Gupta takes a bizarre swerve into the realm of King Lear : Queenie divides her assets between the three children and announces that she will spend four months with each of them in turn. Indian culture’s aversion to putting ill or elderly folk into nursing homes is uppermost in everyone’s minds, but the struggle to balance demanding jobs and caring for an ever more erratic Queenie is not sustainable. Pooja Ghai’s production does ver.
