The Buddha of Suburbia at the Barbican review: an exuberant affair exploring cultural and sexual identity
The life of a horny, selfish, mixed-heritage teenager in Seventies Bromley is brought to rich and vivid life in Emma Rice’s production, which she adapted with Hanif Kureishi from his semi-autobiographical novel.
It features a knowingly seductive performance from newcomer Dee Ahluwalia as the snake-hipped and sybaritic antihero Karim. He’s at the heart of a tight ensemble, featuring some terrific and some broadly caricatured performances, but also using music, puppets and visual puns to weave Rice’s characteristic stage magic.
A joint affair between her company Wise Children and the Royal Shakespeare Company, it’s a big, episodic, exuberant affair: neither company is known for brevity, let’s face it. The show is also complacently self-mocking when Karim becomes – ho ho – an actor.
But the issues it addresses – cultural and sexual identity, Britishness and belonging, class – remain urgent today. And there’s a poignancy too in the contrast between the early, hedonistic, transgressive Kureishi and the reflective but challenging musings he’s penned since becoming severely disabled in a freak accident in 2023.
The story proper begins in 1976, an era of strikes and musical revolutions, cheap drugs, the IRA and the National Front. Karim’s mum is a downtrodden white British doormat, his dad a Muslim from Bombay who’s reinvented himself as a Buddhist mystic to compensate for his boring desk job, and to impress the hippie matrons of Bromley.
Karim is besotted with his schoolfriend Charlie while also dispassionately shagging Jamila, the daughter of his dad’s best friend, before she’s bundled into an arranged marriage. Neither father nor son seem able to see beyond their own immediate gratification.
The novel tackled multiculturalism on a cellular level when it was published in 1990, and the themes remain arresting today. Karim is both abused and exoticised for his dark skin and flowing locks, cast as Mowgli and asked to exploit family caricatures by poncy white directors, but his identity is suburban British.
The naked and often violent racism of the UK in the Seventies is mostly a background hum, distracting him from exploiting the sexual freedoms (and the callous sexism) of the age. Kureishi is a brutally unsentimental writer: there’s no heroism or learning curve here.
There’s plenty of shagging, though, with wagging bananas, bisected grapefruit and bobbing melons doing duty as sex organs. A fusillade of party poppers cracks off whenever someone has an orgasm.
The soundtrack is terrific, embracing Joni Mitchell, The Velvet Underground and Etta James, and the costumes are a perfect Seventies mix of groovy and horrifically beige. Designer Rachana Jadhav conjures sweaty bedrooms, pretentious rehearsal rooms and old-school phone boxes out of a simple assemblage of steps and platforms.
Later scenes, where Karim pinwheels through political awakening, romantic disappointment and addiction are rushed. The happyish ending could feel unearned but chimes with the generous spirit of Rice’s show.
The final image, of the cast dancing to Bill Withers’ Lovely Day is, like so much that she gives us, simply gorgeous.
Barbican, until November 16, barbican.org.uk.
