This theatrical version of Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical tale of a British-Punjabi girl growing up in the Black Country in the 1970s is a big-hearted affair. Which it needs to be. Because, for all the strengths in Tanika Gupta’s adaptation and Roxana Silbert’s production, they haven’t found an entirely cohesive stage form for the story. It’s more than a play, not quite a musical. It’s played with vim, often amusing, sometimes poignant, yet cluttered too.
Syal’s 1997 debut novel is now on the GCSE syllabus. Meena, its 9-year-old heroine, is here a 13-year-old, played with appropriate brittleness by the grown-up Mandeep Dhillon. She and her family are a novelty in a mining village near Wolverhampton. She faces all sorts of growing pains. Her parents are having a new child; she’s about to try to get into a “posh” grammar school; she’s falling under the sway of her brash blonde neighbour, Anita. How Indian should she be? How English?
There are enough new songs in here, with music by Ben and Max Ringham, to make you wonder why there aren’t a few more. And why, for a huge auditorium like this, didn’t they splash out on more instruments than just the keyboard backing by a hairy neighbour (Tarek Merchant)? What they need to do more is let us into Meena’s head to make us feel the appeal of the abrasive Anita. The blasts of songs we know — Cum On Feel the Noize; My Old Man’s a Dustman interpolated into a Punjabi dance — make more impression than the new songs.
Still, we get to feel Meena’s identity crisis, smearing on make-up at the local fair to look “like Babs from Pan’s People”. We feel her confusion and also, impressively, that of the local racists nastily trying to assert their power as their world changes around them.
Bob Bailey’s terrific terraced-street set morphs impressively into a canal-side set for the denouement, but that seems like a lot of effort when the big event in the canal itself occurs offstage. The performers sell us on the characters throughout, though. Jalleh Alizadeh ensures that we know Anita is much less sorted than she lets on; Ayesha Dharker (repeating her role from the 2002 film version) and Ameet Chana as Meena’s parents and Janice Connolly as a kind but caustic neighbour are among a large, comically astute cast. Anita and Me is an entertaining show, certainly, but too episodic to triumph.
Box office: 0121 236 4455, to Oct 24. Theatre Royal, E15 (020 8534 0310), Oct 29-Nov 21