| Theatre |
cries
out for a dream-struck staging that matches and
catches the original. Rarely can stage hands have been so busy with scene
changes, as beds, tables, desks, a chaise-longue, petrol pump and laundry-box
are rushed on and off stage.
The novel is possessed by the fantastic, visionary imagination of
Saleem. As written by Rushdie and beautifully played by Zubin Varla, who
conveys both the character’s vulnerability and swaggering assurance,
Saleem’s one of the magical mystery children, born on the midnight
moment of India’s Independence. These unique offspring, in Saleem’s
view, represent the spirit of political hope that’s later cruelly
extinguished. But Supple, usually such a questing director, has settled
for the wrong earth-bound approach and tried to cram too much into three
hours.
On its own terms, though, this dramatised Midnight’s Children
does offer a fascinating voyage into a family and its Indian history. The
comedy of manners, involving outbreaks of sexual prudery and the dilemma
of Saleem’s doctor grandfather (Kulvinder Ghir), smitten in 1915 by
a femal patient (Meneka Das) whose body is forbidden his longing gaze, gives
way to a turbulent family-drama in which politics fudely intervenes. Varla’s
grandiose Saleem, victim of family secrets, is accordingly despatched to
Pakistan.
There torture, amnesia, a magicians’ ghetto,
a seductive witch and Selva Rasalingam’s sinister
Shiva ironically challenge and transform his sense of identity, depriving
him of sexual potency and voices he hears in his head. The weird, wonderful
sweep of Rushdie’s imagination may need a more exciting stage form.
And Supple’s distillation of impassioned India-Pakistan enmities,
often revealed when the rear panels of Melly Still’s design are dramatically
drawn apart to disclose fighting warriors, is rather plodding. But enough
of Rushdie’s enchantment survives to cast a theatrical spell.
• Until 23 February. Box office: 020 7638 8891 |
It’s
years since I saw anything quite so strange as this epic feat of adaptation
that transports the magic and realism, the fantasising and farce of Salman
Rushdie’s big novel about post-war India and Pakistan from page
to stage. I had to adjust my mind, ears and eyes to cope with the sheer
scale of the novel experience. For Tim Supple’s RSC production,
in an adaptation he has written with Rushdie himself and Simon Reade,
is swept along in a hurly-burly of old cinema newsreel about India and
Pakistan, new video film, old rock music from the West and newer sounds
from the East. On the actual stage, scenes of assassination and political
protest, warfare of the marital and military sort, weddings and torture,
visions and ghosts and a moment of a nurse’s crucial wickedness
in hospital come at us in a helter-skelter rush. The Asian actors perform
with, finely drilled exuberance.
Yet exhilarating as it is to experience the young hero-narrator,
Saleem Sinai, dramatising his life and family-history, which he rightly
sees as being intertwined with that of India’s, I cannot count this
Midnight’s Children as a runaway success. The modest, touring adaptation
by Martin Sherman of another great, related novel, EM Forster’s
A Passage to India, now at Riverside Studios, enjoys what this production
needs and conspicuously lacks – a theatre style of its own. Rushdie’s
novel, whose realism has more than a touch of magic about it, with its
feet on the ground and imagination floating in the clouds, has been given
a literal-minded treatment, yet Midnight’s Children
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