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Book by
Salman
Rushdie
Adapted by
Simon Reade
Tim Supple
Salman Rusdie
Director
Tim Supple
Design
Melly Still
Lighting
Tina MacHugh
Choreographer
Melly Still
Sound
John Leonard
Performers
Saleem
Zubin Varla
Zulfikar/
Wee Willie Winkie/
Mujib
Kish Sharma
Amina
Meneka Das
Pia/Masha
Mala Ghedia
Jamila
Anjali Jay
Naseem/Lila
Shaheen Khan
Alia/Parvati
Syreeta Kumar
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The
Barbican Theatre
Royal
Shakespeare Company
18
January - 23 February 2003
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Salman
Rushdie had a very big story
to tell in the novel version
of Midnight's
Children,
nothing less than the agonised
history of Indian independence,
the simultaneous partition
of India and Pakistan, and
the episodically tragic consequences
of both; and he did it with
wit, skill, and a dose of
magic, by means of the tale
of two of those born at the
very hour at which independence
and partition occurred: the
fateful midnight of 14/15
August 1947.
Adapting this huge story to
the stage is no mean feat,
but although it makes for
a long night in the auditorium
– three and a half hours
– the result is an undoubted
success. A cast as big as
the tale itself drives the
immensity of time and detail
forward with astonishing energy.
The array of characters, the
large time-spread, and the
multiplicity of detail, should
have been thoroughly confusing;
but it is not, because of
the cleverness of structure
and the gripping narrative
thrust of the whole.
Rushdie's debt to Sterne (perhaps
to the whole picaresque tradition)
is obvious in the early part
of the story, whose hero –
if he is an anti-hero he is
a remarkably heroic one, given
the vicissitudes he stoically
bears – takes a long
time getting born. This allows
the decades before independence
to be sketched, setting the
scene for what follows. The
fateful midnight at last arrives;
two of the babies are swapped,
rich for poor, as an act of
socialist defiance against
the odds; and the story of
Indian Muslims and their family
in Pakistan, the cross-border
activity of them, of the two
nations, and of the personal
struggles of a Midnight's
Child, begin in earnest.
This is not so much a play
as a dramatised telling. The
use of documentary video footage
helps greatly in furnishing
relevant background information,
and the succinct summaries
of events provided by the
characters themselves keep
the action in historical focus.
With these aids the big story
can be told without loss,
bringing the sub-continent
to the Barbican stage, and
most of the twentieth century
to the three-and-a-half hours
of its occupancy.
For all the wit and occasional
slapstick that make this a
very funny evening in the
theatre, Midnight's
Children
is fundamentally a tragedy,
and in the end leaves the
audience with a changed sense
of the torturous difficulty
of what has beset (and still
besets) the sub-continent.
It has, after all, been little
more than a half-century since
the traumatic double-change
occurred; Rushdie's tale is
as much an explanation of
the present as a recitation
of the past.
One cannot tell part of this
large story without telling
all of it, because it is a
seamless whole; nor can one
begin to describe Saleem Sinai
and his swapped Midnight twin
Shiva, and their respective
but intertwined histories,
without finding oneself heading
into a Rushdian stratosphere
of mythology and magical realism
– along with every detail
of the story itself. So the
play must speak for itself,
as the novel does; and it
is eminently worth hearing.
AC Grayling |
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