The RSC takes on The Buddha of Suburbia: ‘There will be long hair, offensive flares and party poppers’

Theatre director Emma Rice has added her exuberant touch to Angela Carter, Emily Bronte and Enid Blyton – now she’s bringing Hanif Kureishi’s landmark 1990 debut novel to the stage. She tells Tim Bano why she wanted to adapt the novel, her inventive approach to sex scenes, and how the author has stopped her going down the wrong track

‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ at the Royal Shakespeare Company (Steve Tanner / RSC)

Hanif Kureishi’s freewheeling novel The Buddha of Suburbia is heading to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage. “There’s going to be long hair, offensive flares and party poppers,” grins theatre maker Emma Rice. The acclaimed director has made a career of turning big books and films – The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter, Wuthering Heights, Malory Towers – into theatrically thrilling, emotionally exuberant shows. Now she’s taking on another landmark of literature in the shape of Kureishi’s debut. But… south London in the 1970s? Doesn’t that seem a little drab, a little mundane compared to the fantastical worlds of her previous shows? Well, in Rice’s hands, you know it’s not going to be anything of the sort.

“When I was growing up in the Seventies my mum and her friends used to get together to make patchwork skirts,” Rice recalls. “They would get very drunk and smoke. What I remember most is the smell of smoke coming up the stairs, and lots of laughter. This show is my homage to a bad patchwork skirt, pieced together from different fabrics, and everything reeking of cigarette smoke.”

Kureishi’s novel, based to some extent on his own life, is a dizzying, sometimes shocking blur of south London life in the Seventies. It’s narrated by Karim, son of an English mother and Indian father, who goes on a sexual and spiritual odyssey through the suburban wilds, discovers music, becomes an actor, encounters racism and constantly chases the next high, whether it’s sex, songs, drugs or clothes.