Anita and Me, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre - review and pictures
It's the 1970s in a Black Country mining village. The mine shuts down, a Punjabi family moves in, a new motorway is due to be built, a school is demolished. Times are changing here. Unlikely friendships are forged, broken and lost, as are marriages, jobs and livelihoods.
This latest production of Meera Syal's semi-autobiographical debut novel of the same name, opened at Wolverhampton's Grand Theatre on Tuesday night and runs until Saturday.
After a slightly shaky start, with the acoustics of the stage not always lending to the vocals of the performers, the production - directed by Roxana Silbert, really got into full swing, bringing us the colour and vibrancy of each of the characters living on the fictional street in Tollington.
Tollington, a former mining village based on Essington, is shown to be packed with hard-working people, former soldiers, former miners, housewives, working women - who toil in the factories, as well as tough school kids obsessed with music and magazine Jackie.
The houses all back on to each other, providing the perfect setting for main character - British Punjabi Meena, played by Aasiya Shah, to develop an unlikely friendship with the blonde-haired, short skirt-wearing Laura Aramayo as Anita.
The production doesn't hold back from addressing issues surrounding immigration, racism and imperialism - but does so in a way that permits the audience the shelter of laughter. For example, Anita's sister Tracey, played by Burntwood actress Megan McCormick, has a dog called the 'N' word, that she has no idea is offensive, though she reveals, she wanted to call him Sambo.
When Anita gets a boyfriend, Sam Lowbridge, played by Sam Cole, the pair beat up Punjabi transport official Mr Bhatra, played by Aaron Virdee.
Sam says: "Why should you have a job here and I don't, who asked you to come here anyway?" - though he tries to reassure Meena he wouldn't do the same to her or her family, because "I didn't mean you, I meant the others."
Slow lighting prompts and the sometimes unexpected bursts into song did not detract from the clear and important messages in the production.
When Anita's mother Deidre, played by Rebekah Hinds, is beaten up by her husband before leaving him and her girls for a butcher from Cannock, her family is helped by Meena's.
Fish fingers and chips and Top of the Pops go hand-in-hand with traditional Indian cooking, singing and dancing, to show the emerging multi-culturalism in a community that is still raw from the closure of the mines and indeed, in some households, from the trauma of the Second World War.
Rina Fatania as the formidable yet hilarious Nanima stole the show from the moment she arrived to help Meena's mother, Coronation Street's Shobna Gulati as Daljit, care for her newborn son. Her reflections on her experiences of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan were particularly poignant whilst her stunning vocals and adoption of Black Country colloquialisms was well and truly "Bostin'".
All in all, this was a production that is topical and important now as it was when Syal's novel was first published in the mid-1990s.
When the family up sticks and move to Wolverhampton, with Meena expected to attend the Grammar School, we see how Tollington perhaps is not "stuck in a time warp" but is actually on its way to being connected to the outside world, full of diversity and opportunity.
As Meena says in her final letter to Jackie agony aunts Cathy and Claire: "I'm a British, Asian, dreamer."
Tickets for the show cost from £20 to £21.50.
For more information, call the box office on 01902 429 212 or visit http://www.grandtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/drama/anita-and-me.
By Jessica Labhart
