Review: Barbican Stages Hanif Kureishi's Sexually-Charged Coming-Of-Age Story
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Last Updated 31 October 2024
High unemployment, rising inflation, food shortages and strikes. As an early gag in Emma Rice's adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia goes, south London in the late 1970s was a very different place back then.
For the young Karim Amir (played with extreme likability by Dee Ahluwalia) things are even more complicated. As the bisexual son of an Indian immigrant and a British mum, he has to work out who he is — via a sexually-charged bildungsroman that leads to a f***ing lot of f***ing.
At times, this RSC/Wise Children take on Hanif Kureishi's seminal (in more ways than one) 1990 novel is not so much a play as a party. Shimmering mirror balls descend from the rafters, there are frequent breakouts of disco dancing, and pigeon puppets frolic across the stage. The most clownish characters get the broadest laughs: Simon Rivers as Changez, the Sherlock Homes-reading cuck, unrequitedly in love with his own wife; Rina Fatania's long-suffering aunty Jeeta; Ewan Wardrop's horny, fourth wall-fiddling theatre director Matthew Pyke. These, and most of the other characters, are well fleshed-out, each flecked with their own desires and sadness.
Other elements of Buddha are grating. The sex scenes with fruit and party poppers tire quickly (although the guy sitting next to me was almost in tears, so what do I know). Weightier concerns — in particular Karim's dalliances with the ultimately self-destructive Charlie — are shrug-inducingly half-baked. It's also notable that the title-giving strand of the book/play in which Karim's father bullshits himself into a position of semi-deity when he can barely find Beckenham, let alone enlightenment — gets little airtime. Admittedly I've not read the novel, so maybe it's the same in that, but it's a pity to give short shrift to such a neat idea.
Anyway, there's plenty more to be getting on with — arranged marriages, racially-motivated attacks, the punk movement, manslaughter by sex toy, the rise of Thatcherism... it is a head-spinning amount to digest, even if Buddha lasts almost three hours. Much like the roller coaster episodes in Karim's own messy voyage of self discovery, some of the play's are life-affirming, some less than perfect, others best forgotten.
The Buddha of Suburbia, Barbican Centre, until 16 November 2024.
