I live in Bromley, the actual suburbia in Hanif Kureishi’s seminal debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. And when I read the book, wickedly funny and weirdly sexy as it is, I always envisaged it as set in a drab and melancholy minor key world of browns and greys, not – I’ll be honest – dissimilar to the present day borough.
But in Emma Rice’s typically freewheeling adaptation for the RSC and her own Wise Children company, ’70s Bromley is daubed in gobs of Technicolor – plus, admittedly, quite a lot of brown and grey – for a gleeful joyride of a show that heavily leans into the more Dionysian side of Kureishi’s writing, supercharging the semi-autobiographical story of Karim, a sexually omnivorous mixed-race young man coming of age in the second half of the decade
Playing the ebullient Karim, the infinitely charming Dee Ahluwalia begins the show at a mic, addressing us with a stand-up’s swagger as he sets the scene for a chaotic hurtle through some very formative years that begin as his Pakistani dad – the titular ‘Buddha’ – embarks upon an affair with the boho neighbour, while Karim simultaneously has it off with her preening son.
An awful lot happens in Kureishi’s novel of race, class and sexuality, and Rice manages to cram most of it in, in a story that leaps giddily from the woes of Karim’s parents to the complicated life of his hardcore feminist best friend Jamila (Natasha Jayetileke) - whose father goes on hunger strike to coerce her into marrying the adorably hapless Changez (Simon Rivers) – to Karim’s burgeoning career as a stage actor.
Rice is broadly respectful of the text while piling on some very characteristic flourishes - the show is alive with the music of the era; the frequent sex scenes are accomplished with a hilariously euphemistic deployment of fruit and party poppers; and Ewan Wardrop’s guru-like theatre director Matthew Pyke becomes a sort of meta Svengali, interacting with the audience and overtly manipulating the action on stage, aware he is in a play.
I think herein lies the crux of what Rice has done to The Buddha of Suburbia. In the book the sections with Pyke come across as unsettling and problematic. But on stage much of the darker stuff is whizzed up into Rice’s breathlessly Day Glo direction - it’s still there, but she has opted to play it lightly, even absurdly. When Eleanor, the posh actress who Karim starts seeing, wails about how depressed she is, Rice has her long term foil Katy Owen ham the role up into silliness rather than give us time and space to feel bad for her.
Ultimately Kureishi’s book is a wryly fictionalised account of his formative years, which happen to have been in the late ’70s; Rice’s play honours the book and smartly grasps its themes but her play is, as much as anything, a breathless love letter to the late ‘70s. They’re two contradictory goals; for all the respect Rice has shown, it’s a clear melding of her vision and Kureishi’s, not his uncut. That’s always the deal with Rice, though it feels more acute with this sort of naturalistic source material. But if there are aspects of The Buddha of Suburbia that get lost in translation, there’s more than enough brilliance to compensate – it explodes across the stage with the force and glee and colour of a thousand party poppers.