Robbie Collin
In a post-truth world, JK Rowling fantasies are political
When Meera Syal announced to her parents that she wanted to act, she might easily have opened up an unbreachable rift. This middle-class couple who’d moved from New Delhi to Essington, a mining village in the West Midlands, shortly before she was born in 1961, were part of a generation of immigrants who tended to insist their children went into “safe” careers such as medicine or law.
“Some of my contemporaries, who didn’t have as liberal and as loving parents, wanted to study languages or English not pharmacy or business studies and were just corralled into jobs that they never loved and lives that they probably didn’t want,” she says. Having witnessed this, she was determined to pursue her dream. “I could have lived with disappointment if I’d tried and failed [at acting] – I do all the time – but the not trying would have really crippled me.”
Happily, her parents, already unconventional in that they’d eloped (he was Hindu, she Sikh) gave their blessing. “They understood passion. They thought it was an important motor, not something dangerous.” Their faith was justified. With a double first from Manchester University in English and drama, Syal went on to become one of our most respected actresses, and a trailblazer for British Asians in the arts – she was appointed MBE in 1997, and CBE in 2015.
Dazzlingly polymathic, her novels (including the semi-autobiographical Anita and Me, which is on the GCSE syllabus) and TV series – Goodness Gracious Me, and spoof chat-show The Kumars at No 42 – reached a mainstream audience while staying firmly rooted in the British Asian experience. In creating sketches such as Goodness’s “Going for an English”, in which a bunch of boorish Indians descended on a restaurant after a few lassis and vied to order the blandest meal, and characters such as her flirtatious, Bafta-nominated Granny Kumar, Syal and her co-writers (who included her now-husband Sanjeev Bhaskar) never tried to make their shows “political”.
“It was seen as ground-breaking afterwards, but we never thought: ‘We’re going to sit down and show white people how funny brown people are.’ Our only template was: ‘Is it funny?’ All our comedy influences were Western: we’d grown up loving Jewish writers in America, and Monty Python, The Simpsons. Those influences were refracted through a different cultural lens. If your story has integrity, people will respond to it.”
Sitting backstage at Wyndham’s Theatre, speaking in a soft West Midlands accent, Syal crackles with intelligence. She’s about to rehearse The Trial of Hamlet, a one-off for schoolchildren, in which leading silks will interrogate Hamlet’s characters (including Tom Conti as Claudius and Lee Mack as the Player King) before a Court of Appeal judge decides if the Dane is guilty of murdering Ophelia’s father, Polonius.
As Gertrude, Syal’s responses to cross-examination will be a mix of improvisation and quotes. “It could go anywhere – rather like the Kumars, where we needed to know everything about our characters so when guests went off-piste and asked us things we weren’t prepared for, we knew how to answer,” she says with a smile.
Having been “frightened” of the Bard for decades, she’s supporting the organisers’ Shakespeare Schools Festival’s mission, to introduce Shakespeare to pupils. “I wanted to do this, because there’s this huge mythology surrounding Shakespeare and he is often taught in an elitist way. A lot of kids think he is a bitter pill you have to swallow in lessons rather than understanding he was a supreme and a popular storyteller. I was affected by that. I thought you have to be classically trained to tackle him.”
Only four years ago, she was finally cajoled into playing Beatrice in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Much Ado About Nothing; this year she did a five-month stint as the nurse in Kenneth Branagh’s West End Romeo and Juliet. In April, she was part of the BBC’s Shakespeare Lives evening at the RSC, showcasing his legacy through various mediums, which delighted some, but which others described as being like an upmarket Royal Variety Show. Syal laughs: “Inevitably, it was going to be an evening of moments. I don’t know how you can cover that entire canon in one evening – I think they did a pretty good job.”
There was a “great education” in watching Judi Dench and Ian McKellen close-up. “In Romeo, it was the same watching Derek Jacobi playing Mercutio every night: how do you speak this poetry like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and yet it’s full of cadence, emotion and meaning?”
Shakespeare Lives was produced by Emma Rice, who recently stepped down as the Globe’s artistic director, with some apparently found her too “innovative”. “She’s an extraordinary director, who was treated shoddily. It smacks of misogyny,” Syal says. “She brought a breath of fresh air into the Globe. I think the purists didn’t like [her work], but Shakespeare isn’t a museum, you can’t preserve him in aspic.
“She increased audiences and had amazing reviews – I’m not sure what else you want anyone to do.”
In the same way, Syal is baffled that TV executives seem reluctant to commission more shows like Emmywinning The Kumars (unsuccessfully revived on Sky last year) and Goodness Gracious Me, which – despite its huge popularity – was axed after three series. “There’s a huge brown pound, as there is a pink pound and a grey pound,” she says. “People want to spend that money, and if they’re not being served on terrestrial channels they’re taking it elsewhere. Why are people missing out on a business opportunity?”
Currently waiting to hear if several of her latest scripts will be commissioned, Syal thinks television comedy and drama is in “stagnation”. “We’re living in cautious times and when people are playing safe there’s a lot of period drama, a lot of revivals, they don’t touch risky projects. It’s like there’s an invisible quota system: they think, ‘We’ve got [BBC Muslim sitcom] Citizen Khan, we’ve ticked that box.’ You should commission the show because it’s good and worry about the colour of people in it afterwards.”
Living in multicultural north London, she rarely experiences racial tensions. “When I go back to the West Midlands,” she says, “I notice that the poverty and the dissatisfaction and the lack of hope, and that has to be addressed because that is at the root of everything that is going on. But in a way, it’s why art is more important than ever, because that’s the one place where we encourage empathy and the sharing of stories, and when we do that we discover we are all human.”
She and Bhaskar were working together when they fell in love, but now rarely collaborate, taking turns to accept acting jobs, so that one can be home with their 10-year-old son. “Inevitably, both of us miss out on things, there can be some … discussions, but it’s the only way it works.” Their home also includes Syal’s 80-year-old mother and her daughter from her first marriage, Chameli, 24, a theatre director. “It’s a sitcom,” she half-grins, half-groans. Was Syal ever tempted to nudge her child towards a “safe” career? She shakes her head.
“Nowadays – a lot of my friends think this about their children – there’s no such thing as a steady career. In a way it’s liberating. Everything’s uncertain, so you may as well spend the next 40 years doing something you love.”