Midnight's Children is one of my absolute favorite novels. I came in to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production with a firmly-established love of the characters, themes, plot devices, novelistic structures, and overall sensibility of Rushdie’s work, and a very strong (but guarded) optimism that it could translate to a live theatre event (despite the novel’s being a work of such astonishing “prosiness,” for lack of a better term). I left, however, a bit disappointed. The company had taken on a ridiculously challenging task – this was, far and away, the most ambitious piece of theatre I’ve seen in London, in terms of the logistics of its storytelling, its play with forms, and the unique character of its source material – and had met it in some surprising and intelligent ways, but overall their rendition missed out on the feel of Rushdie’s novel.

The playscript was derived from a television screenplay adaptation of the novel written by Rushdie himself (originally commissioned by the BBC); when production on that screenplay fell through, Rushdie decided to rework the piece in partnership with the play’s eventual director, Tim Supple, and the dramaturg Simon Reade. Rushdie’s original novel clocks in at well over 500 pages in length, covering most of the 20th century and the lives of four generations; a three-hour stage adaptation required massive trimming, and on the whole, the new script’s cuts were surprisingly judicious. I expected major characters and plot points to be removed, but all the most significant and potentially powerful personages and situations were left intact. I was bothered by some choices (the manner in which the Sinais’ significant financial troubles are seemingly forgotten by the script was irritating, and resulted in a missed opportunity to more vividly render Saleem’s childhood), but on the whole, the staggering sweep of events Rushdie included on the page are included in the play.

But this is both a strength and a weakness. In the production’s determination to not over-simplify, and to capture the carnivalesque, always-metamorphosising, onto-the-next-scene nature of Rushdie’s plot, they drowned out the human qualities of the work. The parade of characters and set-ups was universally pitched too high, and each one simply formed a shrill pile of over-mannerised, hammily-acted scenes. A character walks onto the stage, projects what is unique about them quickly (generally in a loud, booming voice, or with an otherwise super-stylized or heightened performance), has a moment to influence the action, and is swept away – sometimes quite literally – by the change to the next scene. While Rushdie manages to get away with this in the novel simply by nature of the width of his canvas – each of these scenes and personalities can be given a fair bit of breathing room in a novel of almost half-a-thousand pages – the play packs too much into one period of time, even with a generous length of three-plus hours (with intermission). While it would, in all likelihood, have been commercial suicide, performing the play in two nights would have been a much, much better idea. If they'd done so, we would've gotten a real play, with scenes and moments that would stand up and breathe, instead of a whirlwind summary.

The important question here is not one of bad directorial decisions made – in fact, most of the creative choices are extraordinarily sound – it’s simply a question of execution. Duplicating the “overpopulation” of the novel is a wise decision, as it is in no way a story about a small, intimate family group; Rushdie has said the novel’s original aim was to figure out how to “write a crowd." The problem with this choice lies in finding the way to put a sense of figures jostling for space and crowding each other out for attention onto the stage without inundating, overstimulating, and irritating the audience. Rushdie does this successfully in the novel through the adoption of his extraordinarily purple – and, IMHO, charming – prose style which quickly makes it clear that all manner of digressions, character portraits, and questionable asides are welcome. The play’s relentless charge through the events of the novel prohibits such a leisurely approach, and several critical sequences suffer: Saleem’s discovery of his telepathic power, for example, was so rushed as to seem almost incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with that development's importance to the story.

The mixed-media elements of the show were also only partly successful; but again, this is more a question of execution. A giant video screen formed the backdrop of the stage, and on the whole, using film was a clever and ingenious decision to supplement the ongoing action, since much of it simply could not have been rendered onstage by live human beings. Incorporating the medium of film is entirely appropriate to the novel (which itself steals rather a lot of cinematic techniques), and is also a clever way to combat, through the use of monumentally large images, the monumental size of the Barbican’s playing space. While some of the cinematic segments stiffed a bit (the Midnight’s Children themselves were surprisingly under-played and under-realized by the their relegation to the cinema-screen backdrop), some moments worked superbly: the presentation of Hanif’s film The Lovers Of Kashmir, for example, followed through hilariously on one of the novel’s most brilliant visual ideas; and Saleem’s screwball fantasy about his ultra-Muslim sister performing a racy nightclub version of “Paper Moon” introduced a surprisingly playful sensibility to the second act.

The surprising nature of this sequence leads into my main criticism of the show: there was no time in it for the sense of "play" that the novel thrives on. The book simply could not exist without its stream of bad puns, hilariously tortured linguistics, and historical faults and hiccups (Rushdie did, in fact, deliberately sabotage the accuracy of his Indian history to prevent Western readers from taking it as a factual account). The stage production, in its aforementioned steamroller drive to plunge through all of the novel’s events, often missed out on chances to duplicate the sensations of the novel. Its more serious moments came through very strongly – Saleem’s castration scene, for example, was truly brutal on-stage and accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making the novel’s harrowing “The widow is green her teeth are black” monologue even more insanely dark and heartbreaking. But with the exception of the scenes mentioned above, the novel’s comedic qualities were drowned out by the sheer clamor of what was occurring on stage. Most of the humor came from cheap one-liners, as opposed to complicated linguistic play, and such shining character moments as Reverend Mother’s language-warping release of hostilities -- the birth of the “whatshisname” running gag – are passed over without explanation and not given the chance to blossom into something truly amusing.

The one-note portrayal of most characters did not impress the actors on me. It took me some time -- most of the first act, in fact -- to warm to Zubin Varla as Saleem (especially in the play’s clunky opening scenes, in which the script ham-fistedly throws out several of Saleem’s defining catchphrases -- “Please believe I am falling apart,” etc. -- without much believable set-up), but he truly proved himself in the second act, rendering Saleem’s descent into desperation, and tenuous half-rebirth, with a spectacular performance. Both Sameena Zehra as Padma and Meneka Das as Mumtaz/Amina also had strong moments, but didn't distinguish themselves in their (integral) roles as much as I might've liked. The rest of the cast faded into a blur of costume changes and overly stylized performance.

I wasn't strongly disappointed by the production, only mildly, because I was reasonably sure that the creative forces behind the play understood the core values of the novel and were doing what they could to try to articulate them. The production was not a mis-reading in the theoretical sense. It was mounted, I gathered, almost unbelievably quickly – rehearsals began in late November for a late January opening in previews, and the text and shape of the play continued to change all the way through the preview performances, which leads me to believe that the play is still a work in progress and was in need of more time to refine its approach. One of its finest moments – the aforementioned Jamila / “Paper Moon” sequence – came into shape late in the rehearsal process (according to the assistant director at the post-show discussion that I stayed for), which can only make me wonder what other successful innovations the cast and crew could have introduced to the performance if they'd been given more time to play with the text and find ways to reconcile its zany, unconventional senses of humor and pathos with the needs of a stage production that is almost epic in scope. The production is a notable accomplishment, but doesn't deliver the absolutely mind-blowing experience that the novel provides.

The production's coming to the U.S. soon -- Ann Arbor, MI and New York at the Apollo Theatre. If you know and love the book, it's certainly worth seeing, if only for the ways in which it points out the novel's strengths without, sadly, replicating them. Do go see it, it's a pretty remarkable undertaking, but don't expect to be really blown away by a night of "great" theatre -- just an interesting one.

Links:

• Midnight's Children mini-site
• The Royal Shakespeare Company: Midnight's Children
• The Barbican
• Amazon: Midnight's Children (US / UK)
• Guardian Unlimited Observer review which basically says exactly what I mean more coherently. For more writings by The Guardian about the play (and novel), check out these search results.

02.20.2003 | 02:19 PM | TrackBack (0)

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