The Almeida wants to examine the ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon of the 1950s but the term ‘man’ seems to create difficulties so the phrase ‘Angry and Young’ is being used instead. It’s strange to encounter a theatre that’s scared of words.
The opening play, Roots, by Arnold Wesker, looks at the conflict between town and country in 1950s Norfolk. Beatie, in her early twenties, returns from London and announces to her warm-hearted but unsophisticated family that her boyfriend, Comrade Ronnie, wants to meet them. He’s a pastry chef who supports a Marxist revolution and Beatie is eager to fight for everything he believes in.
Roots feels like an episode of The Archers that couldn’t be broadcast because it wasn’t exciting enough
During her spell in London, Beatie has become a cultural snob and sneers at her siblings and her parents for their traditional, small-minded ways. Her mum and dad agree to host a party for Comrade Ronnie and the preparations for this event take up the entire play. Nothing else happens. Long chunks of stage time are wasted as the characters peel apples, sweep floors, cook muffins, gobble stew, fill pails with water, gossip about local scandals and discuss the cost of using the electric oven to bake pies.
The climax of the first half involves the death of Stan, the village drunkard, who suffers from explosive diarrhoea. The second half grinds at the pace of a vintage steamroller towards a predictable anti-climax. In the final moments, Beatie stops lecturing her family and directs her borrowed fury at the audience. ‘Stinking commercialism insults us,’ she yells in a generalised rant about capitalism and power. It sounds like a TikTok speech delivered by a millionaire anarchist from her walk-in wardrobe. Roots is held up as a theatrical classic but the reality is rather different. It feels like a two-hour episode of The Archers that couldn’t be broadcast because it wasn’t exciting enough.
In a similar vein, the National Theatre has hired an EastEnders writer, Tanika Gupta, to create a drama about a family of wealthy Bengalis. Queenie Mukherjee is a 68-year-old chef who was awarded the CBE for ‘revolutionising Indian cuisine in Britain’. She owns a chain of Michelin-starred curry-houses that stretches from Mumbai to London and New York.
Meera Syal plays Queenie as a powerful, prickly matriarch with a vicious tongue. She dotes on her younger children but she tells her eldest boy, Raj, that his pregnant wife is a pretentious liar who sleeps with other men. Pretty salty stuff. But it’s all a hoax. Queenie is suffering from dementia and the disease has turned her into a paranoid, violent bully. Her condition is terminal, we’re told, and as soon the diagnosis arrives the entire play collapses. Queenie can’t function as a dramatic character because she has no free will, and her dotty witterings and unfocused behaviour arise from her disorder and not from her personality.
The show then turns into an illustrated lecture about coping with an elderly relative afflicted by Alzheimer’s. Four topics are covered: medical symptoms, legal niceties, terminal care and burial. Take notes, please. Queenie is assigned to an improbably racist neurologist called Enoch who assesses her memory with a far-right quiz.
Despite being hugely wealthy, the Mukherjee family seek help from a stressed-out solicitor at a cheap Citizen’s Advice bureau. He drafts a power-of-attorney agreement which involves two documents that cost £62 each, making £184 in total. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Then, a self-defence lesson in which we learn how to react if an Alzheimer’s patient gets shirty and throws her food at you. Do not, on any account, stuff the food back down her throat as a punishment. It’s tempting but wrong. Instead have her transferred immediately to a maximum-security care home surrounded by barbed wire and search lights. Queenie is duly installed in a heavily guarded facility where she receives excellent one-to-one care from a saintly Polish nurse. Next, there’s a sketch at the Indian embassy where we learn how many forms must be signed before a cremated body can be repatriated to the motherland.
After the interval, act two begins and Queenie dies. This takes 56 minutes which sounds quick, but it isn’t because she keeps rabbiting on about this and that. Her soliloquies are enlivened by the presence of a hairy, half-naked stalker (Zubin Varla) who turns out to be her husband’s ghost. Varla, who looks a bit overfed for an incorporeal being, does his best to inject some energy into this limp waffle. His ghost is the liveliest thing on stage. Apart from the banal plot and the predictable characters, the script is full of ugly swear words, inflammatory racist jokes and passages of bickering from Queenie’s charmless kids. Why is the National being used as a public information service? A two-minute clip on the BBC would convey this advice just as easily.
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