/ARTS WEEKLY/BRITAIN: This Play’s Not the Thing

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Feb 11 2003 (IPS) - As with so much you wait for, the waiting was more interesting than the happening. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, winner of the Booker of Bookers, was no more the novel, and never quite a play in its adaptation for stage in London.

Not even though Rushdie worked on the script of the play, though there are critics who say, because Rushdie worked on the script. Rushdie’s long sentences on which he often loads allegorical meanings may find readers enough within some circles. But those lines eminently did not work in theatre, not even in the hands of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"Let the world be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating," says one character. "I do not believe in high art," says another. "History is coming apart at the seams," the narrator-character announces, pointing to a documentary on the partition of India and Pakistan.

Someone is "trapped in interweaving genealogies." There is something constipated about Rushdie’s cleverness. The lines get so loaded with intended ideas that you lose a sense of what is happening, you lose the sense even that this started out as a play. This is an essay spoken through actors.

Nor quite did the whole idea of having a narrator walking about among the characters on stage. This is a play with a running commentary on itself on stage. Theoretically it could work; as it turned out, it did not.

The wrist watch came to look more attractive than anything on stage as the cerebral ‘tamasha’ wore on to its long awaited end. There was polite applause at the end, theatre goers who have paid a lot to see a Rushdie something at the Barbican do not boo.

This was less a novel adapted for the state than a saga of chapters telescoped into scenes. Rushdie’s restraining hand is far too evident through this. He is not letting go of the novel, of anything from it. Which means it is never an adaptation, and usually only a failed transfer.

Director Tim Supple had promised that the production would be something more than a move "from page to stage". At a quarter of a million words to the novel, that would be a fair bit to pack into even three hours on stage. So it is not that literal a transfer, and yes, there is the cinema add-on effect, but that move comes through detail of presentation, not in the essence of it.

But the play was not simply undone by Rushdie for stage. The theatre version of the novel works only brings out some failings within the novel itself. You begin to see that characters when reduced to their essence are not really characters at all, just different figures through whom Rushdie speaks.

This would suggest that the author of ‘Midnight’s Children’ is often a remarkable writer, but not quite a novelist. He has not created characters who work out the tensions between them. You come away from the book, as from the play, thinking Rushdie, not thinking any of his characters.

There are some scenes that work in isolation, though with the assistance of a screen at the back of the stage used for documentary accompaniment to stage. The sheet scene through which the woman offers her hands and legs and ultimately her breasts for examination transferred on to stage with some ease.

Less easy to figure were the several scenes of copulation, both successful and unsuccessful, presented on stage on beds wheeled on for the purpose – quite unsuitable for children, of course, but hardly shocking, or even telling, for adults.

"Rushdie has been quite pleased with the production," a spokeswoman for the Royal Shakespeare Company told IPS. That, if true, would place him in a rather small minority. English theatre critics, never a charitable lot, have been particularly harsh on this production.

‘Midnight’s Children’ is on a five-week run at the Barbican Centre in London until February 23. It then moves to the Power Centre in Ann Arbor in Michigan in the U.S. from March 12 to 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 – and with it, the embarrassment of presenting it on stage.

‘Midnight’s Children’ had come close to a TV 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. This time, it fails for reasons that have everything to do with the production, and nothing to do with politics.

‘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 scene gets set for the play with the birth of two children on stage while a documentary on Indian independence shows India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru welcoming independence. But there on the play loses its way in a mass of figures criss-crossing one another, but never quite interacting with one another.