Meera Syal interview: 'If you can do this play, you can handle most things'

Farce sighted: Meera Syal will play Dotty Otley in the Michael Frayn classic at the Lyric Hammersmith
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

It's the marriage of two national treasures: a 40th-anniversary revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, widely regarded as one of the funniest plays ever written, starring actress and writer Meera Syal, widely regarded as one of the funniest people in Britain. Syal is best known as one of the gang that revolutionised the British sketch show, with Goodness Gracious Me, and the sitcom, with The Kumars at No 42.

She wrote the scripts for Bhaji on the Beach and Anita and Me, and is a familiar face in character roles on TV. But she began her career on stage and has appeared most recently as a canny Nurse in Kenneth Branagh’s staging of Romeo and Juliet; in Shirley Valentine at the Menier Chocolate Factory; and as Miss Hannigan in Annie.

“If you love comedy, you have to do it in front of a live audience to tighten those muscles up,” says Syal. “And this play [Noises Off] is one of the few things I’ve read that has made me fall off my chair laughing, even before you get to the physical comedy in it. I feel it’s sort of an actor’s rubicon: if you can do this, you can probably handle most things.”

Indeed. Frayn’s meta-farce focuses on a touring production of a sex comedy called Nothing On, beset by affairs, rivalries, alcoholism and deafness among the cast and crew. In act one we see the play chaotically rehearsed; in act two we see it falling apart backstage; and in act three we witness its total implosion out front. Dresses are lost, trousers dropped. The cast playing the cast have to juggle axes, flowers, whisky bottles and various plates of sardines, as well as a fiendishly complicated series of entrances and exits and mutating cues and lines.

“It’s like jazz, really,” says Syal, who is 57 but looks no different to when I last interviewed her more than a decade ago. “You can’t start doing the improvisatory flourishes until you know the melody.” She plays Dotty Otley, a sitcom star of a certain age who has sunk her savings into the play, and who promptly starts an affair with a younger co-star. “It’s great that she’s an older woman in charge of her sexuality, who is not apologetic or seen as sad,” says Syal.

London theatre still to come in 2019

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Jeremy Herrin’s revival is at the Lyric Hammersmith, where the play first premiered in 1982. “There’s a lovely circularity to that,” says Syal, “and I’ve sort of lucked out, because when Michael was writing it for Patricia Routledge, she’d done her knee in, so Dotty’s pretty much the only character who doesn’t rush up and down the stairs all the time.”

As she says, Frayn’s play is impressive not just for its wit and its complexity but for its compassion. “These characters’ vulnerabilities make them funny, but the play is also a love letter to the theatre with a huge admiration and adoration of actors that go on and slog it out.
Even though sex farces were already going out of fashion when Frayn was writing it, Noises Off is regularly revived all over the world. Herrin’s version is set in the Eighties but features a diverse cast more in tune with modern Britain. “And about time too,” says Syal. “It’s the same as when I played Shirley Valentine. We never changed a word of the script and no one ever mentioned it. Good stories are universal, aren’t they?”

She is understandably bored of talking about diversity in the industry — “You’d be better off talking to people who aren’t engaging with it,” she says, before gamely engaging — but her experience as a groundbreaker is informative. Born in Wolverhampton to parents from the Punjab, she was brought up in nearby Essington, a mining village where the Syals were the only non-white family. At Manchester University, where she studied English and drama, she co-wrote and performed a play about a British-Indian girl who runs off to be an actress, which won prizes at the National Student Drama Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe.

She worked at the Royal Court, then the National, and went on to smash through barriers as a writer and a performer on TV, her cultural significance recognised by those twin accolades, a CBE and an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? Yet she says “theatre is still where I am offered more interesting stuff, though you can see the sea change coming [in film and TV]. Everybody is on board now with change, and those conversations are going on, even though it seems slow for people who have waited for it for years.”

Currently, of course, the sort of racism and “othering” Syal experienced in the Midlands in the Seventies is enjoying a resurgence thanks to Brexit and so-called populism. “It’s been legitimised to say stuff, to hate outsiders, and you think, ‘Bloody hell, I thought we’d got over that,’” she says. “But what gives me hope is that there’s a generation coming up that really don’t want that, the ones who are protesting about climate change, who are redefining our gender discussions, and who want to be part of a world community.”

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Her daughter Chameli, 26, the product of her first marriage, is a theatre director. And she has a son Shaan, 13, with her second husband Sanjeev Bhaskar, who was her co-writer and co-performer in Goodness Gracious Me and the Kumars (she played his granny) before they got together. They alternate jobs as much as possible so one of them is always home. Syal’s mother still lives with them in north London, as did her accountant father until his death last year.

“It’s like living in a sitcom,” she says. “There’s lots of people out there, especially older mothers like I was, juggling a school-age kid and parents. When my son was younger I thought, ‘Someone’s got to invent a buggy that fits an old person on one side and the baby on the other.’”
She adds that the set-up has taught her son empathy and patience, echoing her earlier comment that “the arts are important because the arts are about empathy, sharing stories and reminding people what we share, not what makes us different”.

Syal is much funnier than I’m making her sound. When I ask about her seeming agelessness she says: “Blood of virgins, very hard to get these days.” When I mention that I interviewed Bhaskar at their home a few years back, she says: “You would have got BISCUITS if I’d been there.”

She is writing a historical drama and a sitcom but when I ask what her ambition is, she says: “Actually, I feel really lucky to be working. Funny how your boundaries change. In your twenties you think, ‘I’m gonna win an Oscar one day’. In your thirties you think, ‘I shall probably win a Bafta.’ In your forties, ‘A British Comedy Awar… yeah, I could do that.’ In your fifties you think, ‘A job would be nice…’”

Noises Off is at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6 (020 8741 6850, lyric.co.uk), Jun 27-Jul 27

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