Writers: Emma Rice with Hanif Kureishi
Director: Emma Rice
It was always going to be a tough ask putting on stage one of the best books of the 1990s. Hanif Kureishi’s debut novel is so entrenched in its South London location that it’s impossible to recreate the sprawling net-curtained middle-class boroughs in a theatre. Instead of place, director Emma Rice tries to evoke the 70s setting with flares and Y-Fronts, but these details, as nice as they are, can’t capture the breathless breadth of the novel. And while Kureishi’s book was always rooted in reality, despite its outlandish events, Rice inserts too much comedy in her version, which is full of stock characters.
The Buddha of Suburbia was always funny, but never this funny. The visual jokes are endless – party poppers are set off every time anyone has an orgasm, and there are many; puppet pigeons fly during scene changes; funny dances – and could be the result of Kureishi who, after reading the early drafts of the play, first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, told Rice that the play had to be funny and political. The politics are here but almost hidden by the commitment to make the audience laugh. The humour – those party poppers – seems a little childish, while the early attempts at audience participation are somewhat awkward.
Apart from starting at the end, on the eve of Thatcher’s victory in 1979, with Karim surrounded by his newly configured family, Rice’s adaptation is pretty faithful, following Karim’s journey from a schoolboy in the suburbs to an actor in an experimental theatre company. We meet his father, the eponymous Buddha, who leads yoga classes in Bohemian Eva’s house. We meet Eva’s son, the musician Charlie, who switches from Glam Rock to Punk as the 70s progress. And we meet Aunt Jeeta and Uncle Anwar, who run the Paradise Stores, along with their sex-hungry daughter Jamila.
But while the characters are all here, Rice gives them all larger-than-life personalities that verge on the farcical at times, overwhelming the brief discussions of politics and racism. Katy Owen plays Karim’s mother as if she is a Julie Walters invention in a sketch by Victoria Wood and later plays Karim’s girlfriend Eleanor as an airheaded privileged trustafarian. Rina Fatania is a great comic actor, and her depiction of the randy Marlene is one of the evening’s highlights. She would be great in a straightforward farce, nailing a laugh just with a knowing smile. Ewan Wardop is hilarious as the preciously inflated theatre director Matthew Pyke, but it’s a familiar stereotype in theatre and TV.
The casting of Karim’s father is more interesting. The lithe Ankur Bahl makes for a seductive Buddha, very different from the pompous but engaging portrayal by Roshan Seth in the television adaptation of 1993. Bahl steals every scene he’s in. Dee Ahluwalia takes centre-stage as Karim, who announces at the start, “I am an Englishman born and bred. Almost.”. His Karim is lively and sexually fluid, and Ahluwalia captures Karim’s energy to a tee.
The whole cast works hard, clambering over Rachana Jadhav’s scaffolded set of platforms and rooms. The actors never flag, even if the audience does as the three-hour mark approaches. The over-attention to comedy – there are bananas for penises, too – becomes wearying after a while, and you wish for a scene that is played more seriously, giving more weight to Kureishi’s semi-autobiographical tale about race, class and ambition.
Perhaps Rice’s adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia works better if you haven’t read the book. Newcomers to the story of Karim may be delighted with this celebration of youth and opportunity and not worry that the characters are paper-thin. However, when the novel was published in 1990, it felt fresh and adventurous, but in this iteration, it feels old-fashioned and, despite the many sex scenes, safe.
Runs until 16 November 2024
One of the few accurate reviews I’ve read. It’s well staged, and the cast are good, but it just ends up more like an East is East-ish approximation of the novel, all the comedy turned up, and everything else in the book, the thornier stuff, the nuance, the subtler stuff about difference, outsider-ism, all kind of left out. It’s a very broad version of the story, reduced to bullet points.