![]() ![]() ![]() Aasiya Shah makes a wonderful Meena, embodying the youthful but kooky jaunt of a young girl not comfortable in her own skin, but still eager to “be cool”. Yet Gupta is quick to stress that Anita and Me is first and foremost a coming-of-age story, which the actors assert with stellar performances. Gupta keeps the play entirely relatable by parroting what we read in the papers every day. We hear the familiar war cry of the far-right, that immigrants are “coming here and taking our jobs”. Anita is told that she is “not like the others”. The micro-aggressions are the same – of a nice day, Anita’s father is told that it will finally be “sunny enough” for him. The writer Tanika Gupta pointedly teases out the parallels between the time that Syal and Anita grew up and modern society. It seems only fitting that the stage adaptation now comes to King’s Theatre amidst a climate of uncertainty about migrant rights and national identity. The book was then adapted for film in 2002, the same year that the British National Party won three council seats. When she first published the novel in 1996, Syal was reflecting on the experience of growing up in the 1970s as a second-generation immigrant in an isolated Midlands village. Meera Syal’s Anita and Me continues to be vividly relevant to politics today. ![]()
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