The Buddha of Suburbia
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon

ADAPTING any novel for the stage creates problems but Hanif Kureishi’s first kaleidoscopic novel with its range of characters, almost Dickensian in their idiosyncrasies, and profusion of incidents, poses any director a challenge.

Fortunately Emma Rice, of Knee High and Wise Children fame, is well up to the task.

Kureishi’s semi-autobiographical tale of Karim, the teenage son of a Pakistani father and an English mother living in the south London suburbs in the 1970s, is both a coming-of-age and a state-of-the nation story.

The present younger generation struggles even more with identity problems while racism still thrives today and our current economic decline mirrors that of half a century ago.

Among the difficulties Karim has to negotiate are his various relatives, including Haroon, his frustrated father, who has embraced Buddhism and developed a business of karma sessions with local groups.

Moreover, Eva, his father’s ambitious mistress, is threatening to break up the family home and Jamila, a favourite progressive cousin, refuses to consummate the arranged marriage her father has blackmailed her into with a delightfully naive, incompetent imported husband, Changez.

All this is exacerbated by his own freelance male and female sexual adventures.

Rice’s own adaptation with Kureishi’s assistance retains the political undertow of the novel while bringing her particular innovative skills, mixing physical theatre with music and an element of knockabout fun to what is always essentially an ensemble piece.

Sex, which is virtually a currency within the novel, becomes a kind of comic Olympiad of physical athletics, including an hilarious wrestling orgy to which Ewan Wardrop’s avant-garde theatre director genially invites a front row audience couple to a further round.

At the centre of a brilliant cast is Dee Ahluwalia’s Karim, on stage throughout as commentator and performer in his own troubles.

What emerges from this delightful production is a sense of the warmth and love that underlies the “capitalism of the feelings” and social stresses that beset an extended immigrant family and especially their children who consider themselves, like Karim, as English — “almost.”  

Runs until June 1. Box office: 01789 331-111, rsc.org.uk.