Review: SWEETMEATS at Bush Theatre

The playwright who has been one to watch for a while now, takes a left-field approach by pairing an Indian woman with a Pakistani man both in their mid-60s. They encounter each other at a weekly workshop run by the unseen shortbread-munching Mrs Radcliffe, ostensibly aimed at helping those living with type 2 diabetes manage their condition. Whilst this doesn’t exactly smack of violins and red roses, occasionally such humdrum scenarios can strike comedy gold. Here, Hema (Shobu Kapoor - forever associated with the role of Gita in Eastenders during the mid 1980s) takes an instant dislike to the headphones wearing Liaquat (Rehan Sheikh) who pays little attention during the sessions and appears to have scant understanding of his disease or how the condition might impact him if not carefully controlled.

Unfortunately, with a preponderance on back stories involving deceased partners and the cultural requirement to maintain devotion to dead loved ones, there was little indication to this reviewer that the pair would ever move beyond irritatingly furtive chit-chat at the bus stop. I longed to witness the characters develop into more than the troublesome elder burden to an energised younger family. Here, the cliché is side-stepped altogether by them simply spending evenings alone and largely forgotten. On a set which includes their respective homes depicted side-by-side, she knits beneath a photo of her graduate son and he curls-up on the sofa draped in his late wife’s shawl, listening to tape recordings of her voice dredged from a box.

Diabetes impacts the South Asian community perhaps more than most and there are digs at historic colonial efforts at population control through starvation on the sub-continent. Later, during a silly and largely unbelievable raid on a grocery store to steal a mango, there is even an airing of justification by comparing the fruit’s theft to the behaviour of the British through Empire. It’s momentarily amusing, but entirely predictable and carries insufficient heft for a topic of such undoubted significance and weight.

There are multiple occasions during which dramatic elements are introduced and then not properly explored which is particularly jarring when the juxtaposition of poignancy and tragedy could add considerably. The most obvious occurs when Liaquat retrieves the last few remnants of his late wife’s curry stored with pathetic pathos in a plastic strawberry ice cream tub in the freezer. He defrosts a little then dozes-off on the sofa while listening to a recording of her voice as a fire breaks-out in the kitchen causing fire alarms to sound. It proves a dramatic ending to the first half. However, when we resume and Hema contrives a reason to pay him a visit, Liaquat (showing not the slightest sign of the ill-effects of smoke inhalation) dismisses the black smudging ranged across the walls of his home, as a result of the grandchildren baking cakes and cookies when he wasn’t there. The matter conveniently dismissed, they set about picking ingredients from the overgrown garden with which they prepare a meal. It’s lazy writing and wholly unbelievable, requiring fundamental reconsideration if it is to genuinely elucidate for a wider audience the people (and peoples) it purports to depict.

SWEETMEATS continues to play at Bush Theatre’s large space until 21st March and has a turgid running time of 2 hours and 30 mins including interval.