Meera Syal is, in some ways, the victim of her own success. Her 1997 autobiographical first novel sold in vast numbers, became a GCSE set text and was made into a movie. Now Tanika Gupta has adapted it for the stage, and, while it makes a lively night out, its story of the cultural conflicts experienced by a British-Asian girl in the 1970s can’t help seeming a touch familiar.
Gupta’s version starts with two advantages. It comes with original music by Ben and Max Ringham, played on stage by Tarek Merchant in the character of Hairy Ned, which gives life to the action and fulfils several functions. It enables the heroine, Meena, a schoolgirl living in a Black Country mining village, to express her dilemmas in song. It also allows scope for satire of patronising Anglo-Saxon attitudes, especially in a quasi-revivalist number about the importance of “saving the heathen”. At the climax, the score even shows an English morris dance being absorbed into the pulsating rhythms of the Punjab. The only snag is that Gupta’s lyrics, and some of the spoken dialogue, often get lost, either because of the Birmingham Rep’s acoustic or because the young actors rush their verbal fences.
The second big asset of Gupta’s adaptation is its local resonance. It clearly chimes with an audience that knows how communities were demolished in the interests of extending Midlands motorways. More importantly, the on-off friendship between the sharp-witted Meena and the tart-tongued Anita echoes the larger contrast between the dreams of aspirational Asians and the limited horizons of the working-class English. That last point is brought out strongly when we see Anita lazily endorsing the racist brutality of the village tearaway who beats up a visiting Indian bureaucrat.
If that evokes unhappy memories of the period, and even anticipates today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, the show also touches cheerier nerves: the house erupts with the laughter of recognition when Meena tells her anxiously hospitable parents, as Anita arrives for an evening meal: “We don’t all have to go to the door!”
Inevitably, some things go missing in the stage version. In the book, Syal uses an accumulation of social detail, and especially TV programmes such as Opportunity Knocks and The Golden Shot, to show the allure of popular culture for the impressionable Meena. I was also sorry to lose certain characters, such as the Methodist youth leader Uncle Alan, whose puppyish enthusiasm conceals a radical spirit. Certain themes, such as the longing of Meena’s mother for her Punjabi homeland, have also been more vividly expressed in other plays, not least Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Khandan (Family), seen last year at the Rep.
But, audibility issues aside, Roxana Silbert’s production bowls merrily along. There is good work from Mandeep Dhillon as Meena, slowly learning to embrace her Indian heritage, and from Jalleh Alizadeh as the abrasive, sexually precocious Anita. Ayesha Dharker as Meena’s deeply nostalgic mum, Janice Connolly as a loyal neighbour and Joseph Drake as the village hoodlum provide strong support. Even if we occasionally feel we have been here before, the show has a communal zest that connects directly with its Birmingham audience.
- At Birmingham Rep theatre until 24 October. Box office: 0121-236 4455. At Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, 29 October to 21 November. Box office: 020-8534 0310
