Mandeep Dhillon and Janice Connolly in Anita and Me at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. Picture: Ellie Kurttz
Anita and Me continues at Theatre Royal Stratford East until 21 November.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
A musical take on Meera Syal’s colourful semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in a village near Wolverhampton in the 1970s, this show ought to have a lot going for it. The novel has been hugely popular for nearly 20 years, and it’s widely set as a GCSE text, so it’s very well known to many people. Sadly, in this version directed by Roxana Silbert, it feels very restrained and flat. The accents are so overdone that the dialogue is sometimes incomprehensible and too much of the acting is wooden.
But of course there are positives as well. Bob Bailey’s magnificent set – all red brick and front doors – is actually a sectional screen where sections revolve to create other spaces. It’s ingenious and works very well. Tanika Gupta’s neatly adapted script makes good theatrical sense of a complex, flashback-laden, very digressive source text and comes up with some clever solutions by merging characters and incidents while still using some of Syal’s original words.
Mandeep Dhillon is fairly childlike in the central role of Meena, although not wholly convincing as a 13 year old – four years older, incidentally, than Syal’s original Meena. She pouts, frowns and cavorts about in an attempt to be English and is often quite funny. One of the best performances of the evening comes from Janice Connolly as the kind, decent salt-of-the-earth neighbour keen to join in every activity. Joseph Drake makes the self-aware anti-social Sam believable and Ameet Chana and Ayesha Dharker give sensitive accounts of Meena’s parents.
Much less successful is Jalleh Alizadeh as Anita, the girl who leads Meena astray until eventually she sees sense and moves on. Alizadeh’s acting feels forced and you can almost hear her consciously managing the accent which doesn’t sound remotely natural. She isn’t quite brash and vulgar enough either. Some of the ensemble work – The Ballbearings Committee, for instance, which is Meena’s name for the local women who work chorus-like in light industry – is pleasing but too much of it seems contrived as if the director and choreographer are thinking: ‘Hey this is a musical. Let’s get everyone moving. Even a Morris dance will do.”
Songs are often begun unaccompanied (not always, it has to be said, initially quite in tune) and then picked up by actor-musician Tarek Merchant on keyboards (music is by Ben and Max Ringham, lyrics by Tanika Gupta). He plays Ned who is supposed to be a musician anyway so that isn’t a bad idea and he’s a fine accompanist. The trouble is that it makes the show feel very low budget after the style of a school play accompanied by the music teacher on a piano. And the device of having Meena soliloquising in the form of sung letters to agony aunts in a teenage magazine feels lazily repetitive.
Susan Elkin
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