“It’s about building a vocabulary”: How Nitin Sawhney created the evocative score for A Tupperware of Ashes

In A Tupperware of Ashes, composer Nitin Sawhney reunites with playwright Tanika Gupta to tell a story of identity, ageing and the unravelling of memory. As the play arrives on streaming platform National Theatre At Home this week, he reflects on building context and feeling into its Bengali-influenced score, using sound to evoke a distorted reality, and the ambient hum that underpins our very existence.

Memory and identity go hand in hand, and the past forms the building blocks of our personhood. This notion is at the core of A Tupperware of Ashes – a moving play that riffs on Shakespeare’s King Lear to tell the story of a headstrong Michelin star chef named Queenie, played by Meera Syal. When she’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, her world doesn’t collapse so much as it succumbs to a slow, painful deterioration. 

We see who Queenie is in Syal’s magnificent performance – in the way she leads her family of three, now adult children with a firm but loving hand, and through her wit and confidence. But you can also hear her in the Bengali-influenced score from the prolific and acclaimed composer Nitin Sawhney, which infuses classical Indian instruments like the bansuri and tabla into warm, ambient compositions that speak to the rich and rewarding life Queenie has had. As Queenie loses her memory, and in turn, who she is as a person, the music seems to fade away too. The serene, melodic compositions make way for propulsive electronic tracks that seem so distant from the woman at the centre. 

With A Tupperware of Ashes, Sawhney has come full circle in a sense: he first met playwright Tanika Gupta almost three decades ago when he composed his first ever film score for her 1997 film Flight. For their reunion, the composer revelled in creating impressionistic soundscapes that mirror Queenie’s loosening grip on reality. “There’s a lot of beautiful imagery and metaphor in this, which I found really enjoyable to work with,” he says. Calling from London, the composer shares how he found the character’s identity in the music, and why silence is just as vital as sound.

You’ve worked in theatre for many years. Has your approach changed at all as you’ve gained more experience?

I respond to every project for what it is trying to do or trying to say. I’ve got a particular connection with Tanika Gupta, because I’ve worked with her before. She’s a fantastic writer, and, in fact, the first film that I ever scored was with her back in the early 90s. So I’ve known her for a very long time, over 30 years. It’s about building a vocabulary that fits the idea and what it’s about. For example, when I worked with [2007 play] A Disappearing Number with Complicité, that was very much working with a mathematical vocabulary because it was focusing on [mathematician Srinivasa] Ramanujan as an allegorical character. So from that point of view, I was trying to find a way of representing the narrative of his spectre over the whole story in a way that didn’t feel didactic, but was also adding to the feeling and the emotional development.

How would you describe the vocabulary of A Tupperware of Ashes? 

It’s a very emotional and powerful subject because there is an erasure of identity to some degree, and that is happening in real time in slow motion. Queenie is actually trying to reconcile her reality with her imagined world, and it’s very interesting because there are lots of philosophical ideas that arise from this. For example, if you live in a godless, cynical universe, what is to say that her imagined universe is of any less value than the one that we occupy all the time? 

A lot of people’s natural instinct is to pull people who have dementia or Alzheimer’s out of their version of reality. But in fact, if you tell them that, for example, their husband has died – as in Queenie’s case – it’s a blow to their memories, because they have no recollection that that’s the case. That actually creates that sense of living in a borderless existence between reality and imagination. I tried to pull this dream world into our world. It was about finding her background in India and also her heritage and context, mixed together with the context of her husband, and her distortion of memory as well. At times, the music is twisted and not clear. That’s what I was trying to do: to play with the impressionistic world that she inhabits, and find a musical way to represent that.

Is that heritage and context what led you to the specific instruments that you use?

Very much. I didn’t want to use them in a direct way. For example, with the bansuri, which is the Indian classical flute, I would slow it down. I would pitch it down so [it] felt almost like wading through the treacle of her memories. I think that’s so nothing felt easy. Although there is a sense of memory, it’s also a feeling that something isn’t right all the time. It wasn’t just a straight choice of instrumentation, but also a choice of how to take that instrumentation and make it feel like you’re looking at it through a different lens.

You’ve already touched on this, but how did you approach illustrating the progression of Queenie’s illness?

I wanted to have a few songs. Zubin Varla and Meera Syal both can sing very well. I like to take into account the talents of the people that are on stage, because this isn’t just music, where you say, “OK, here’s some songs, and anyone can sing them.” It had to be about their specific talents and their own experiences as well. Meera has had her own experiences with Alzheimer’s, with her own parents, so I wanted to find music that they could represent and sing. Also, as the play goes along, there’s a gradual erasure of identity, and I wanted it to feel that way. I wanted it to feel that the music was gradually shifting into a world that is beyond us.

Nature plays a big part in identity construction in this play. Water is a major symbol.

We start with the ocean, we end with the ocean. This is something I’ve said many times, and I said it years ago in a tweet: our lives are like spray that comes from an ocean wave, and then we have our brief moment in the sunlight, and then when we die, we fall back into the wave, and the wave falls back into the ocean of consciousness, which is what I think is the case with the universe and how we are. I don’t subscribe to any particular religion, but that’s the closest thing I can find. It’s interesting, a scientist from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN said almost the same thing recently. It’s a very beautiful image, and it really resonated with me, this concept of the ocean constantly beckoning to Queenie in the form of her husband. 

Did you find you were incorporating these natural sonic landscapes into the music?

Absolutely. We talk about the geophony of sound that creates a drone around us. I’m pretty sure that Indian classical music originated that way, where the Indian classical raags manifest from a drone sound – so you will have the tanpura creating a drone. When I was travelling around the world, I found myself really drawn to playing music from the sound of insects around me, or from the sound of the sea, or the sound of animals in the distance. There is [a book] called The Great Animal [Orchestra] by Bernie Krause. He talks about this phenomenon of how all of the insects and animals fill up every single band in the spectrum of frequencies. And when one drops out, another species will come in to fill that. I find that an amazing concept, that there’s constantly this hum. 

The only time I’ve noticed the absence of any kind of hum or drone was when I was paragliding years ago. Suddenly I was really struck by the absence of sound, and particularly how loud the creaking of the rope was next to my ear. It’s fascinating how we take drones for granted all the time. There is this constant sense of the ocean as a drone, and it represents a drone of consciousness. It represents our very complicated and ambiguous relationship with the whole notion of existence. 

Something that struck me about the play was actually the moments of silence, which felt very heavy and profound. You really feel Queenie’s isolation when you don’t hear anything. I’m curious whether you intuitively picked out these moments of silence or were you told what scenes needed music?

We discussed at great length where to place music and where not to place music. I think [of] Rabindranath Tagore and Einstein, when they spoke in the 1920s about the silence between the notes. And so did Miles Davis in terms of how he played jazz. There’s a lot of power in silence. I think quite often I find myself working with directors, and I’ll advise them to use silence more, because it makes the music more potent and powerful when it arrives. I’m not a great fan of underscoring every moment.

How do you find the projects that resonate with you? Is it something that you actively seek out, or do they find you?

A combination of both. Definitely, if Tanika calls me up and says, “I’d love you to work on something,” then I’m very interested, because I really like her writing and I like her as a person. She’s a very cool human being. I do look for projects that I feel resonate with me. I’m very lucky in that I get to do a lot of things that I really enjoy, for example, doing the Booker Prize last year as a judge was amazing. To read 156 incredible books – virtually all of them were amazing – and to be immersed in all of those different universes on a daily basis was a real privilege and very exciting.

You mentioned working with Tanika Gupta and Meera Syal before. Did this feel like a homecoming?

It felt like a very moving exploration of identity and ageing. People that I’ve known for a very long time, like Tanika or Meera, or even Zubin, who I hadn’t seen for a while, it was interesting to re-engage with them [after] their experiences of dementia or Alzheimer’s with people they loved. That was quite illuminating and also inspiring creatively, but also thought-provoking in lots of ways.