/ARTS WEEKLY/BRITAIN: ‘Midnight’s Children’ Goes on Stage

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 22 2002 (IPS) - Salman Rushdie’s novel ‘Midnight’s Children’ will finally go on stage in London in January next year. The novel is being adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company after several attempts to stage it earlier failed.

The stage adaptation of ‘Midnight’s Children’, which won the Booker award in 1981 and then went on to win the Booker of Bookers in 1993, is being led by Salman Rushdie himself.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled,” says Rushdie. “It’s a gigantic novel of about a quarter of a million words. It’s a difficult thing to put into a play, but there is a now more fluid way of doing a play. You don’t have to have sets; you can now be very inventive on stage.”

‘Midnight’s Children’ will have a straight five-week run at the Barbican Centre in London from Jan.18 to Feb. 23. It then moves to the Power Centre in Ann Arbor in Michigan in the United States from Mar.12-16. There on it moves to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in New York city, where it will be hosted by Columbia University.

The play will return to Britain for an extensive tour that will take it to Aberdeen in Scotland, and to Nottingham, Birmingham, Bath, Leeds, Norwich and Salford Quays. The tour ends in June.

“We would like very much to take the play in autumn of next year to Bombay,” Caro Mackay of the Royal Shakespeare Company told IPS. The company hopes to stage ‘Midnight’s Children’ in Bombay with local commercial and production sponsors.

Bombay would be a natural home for the play, Royal Shakespeare Company managers say. “The essence of Salman as a writer to me is what you experience when you go to somewhere like Bombay,” director of the play Tim Supple told media representatives at the Barbican Monday.

“His writing is so much a product of a panorama, a mosaic, a chaos of inputs which are Indian: mystical, lyrical, poetic, vulgar, cheap, playful, witty, crude. On the streets of Bombay you are bombarded with all these things – trashy, tear-away, rip-away, irreverent,” he added.

The producers talk of moving the novel “from page to stage” but this “is not an attempt to put the novel on stage,” said Supple. “We can create a theatrical event that is like a sibling of the novel, but it will not be the novel.” The stage version would “make its own way but the experience it would offer will be similar to that of the book”.

The play will not rely on “big slabs of language from the book,” Supple said. “What’s difficult is finding a theatrical language that matches the book, because you can’t put the book’s language onto the stage, because it’s not theatrical, it’s a book.” The sets will be almost bare, he says, with little more than a bed and a chair and a carpet.

Those quarter of a million words would generate a play that is “three to four hours long with one or two intervals,” Supple said. But more seriously speaking, the play would run about three hours, with an interval, he said.

“Rushdie has been associated with literary seriousness, and of course he is a serious writer,” said Supple. “But also, he is fundamentally a showman who writes with mischief…he teases and plays. Theatre is about entertainment, and it is the showman Rushdie who will be in the forefront of this production.”

‘Midnight’s Children’ came close to a television adaptation when BBC planned a television production in five episodes. Rushdie wrote the screenplay, but the production was dropped for political reasons following the ‘fatwa’ against Rushdie over his novel ‘The Satanic Verses’.

Those political issues will not stand in the way of this production, Simon Reade, dramaturge and co-adapter of the novel for stage told IPS. “This is a different work, the fatwa against Rushdie has been lifted, and since the beginning of this year he has been moving without bodyguards in London and in New York.” But, he added, “I cannot say what precautions cautious theatre managers might take.”

This will be the first ever adaptation of ‘Midnight’s Children’ for stage. Tim Supple had adapted Rushdie’s ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’ at the National Theatre two years ago. Rushdie described that adaptation as “brilliant”.

‘Midnight’s Children’ is an allegory of modern India focused on the linked fates of two children born on the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the date of India’s independence from Britain.

The story which works at many levels places its characters against the backdrop of significant historical events in the Indian sub-continent during the first 30 years of India’s independence.

“It is a history of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, but not history either,” said Reade. “It is fiction, but closer to truth than many works of history might be. It is also a soap opera, and it is also the story of one man. It celebrates the contrast between different peoples, and the magic that comes out of confrontation if you can move towards resolving it.”

The book is in this sense a very 21st century story “and we will bring our own sensibilities to this,” Reade added.

A cast of mainly British Asian actors will perform in the adaptation, with the leading role of Saleem played by Zubin Varla. Others will include Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia, both well known from their roles in the comedy show ‘Goodness Gracious Me’.

The play will be accompanied on its tours by an exhibition ‘Maps at Midnight’. The multi-media presentation will draw on images and themes from ‘Midnight’s Children’ and invite audiences to contribute their own thoughts and views on its themes.