‘The Buddha of Suburbia’: Emma Rice on Working With Hanif Kureishi to Make His Iconic 1970s-Set Novel Relevant to Modern Theater Audiences

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran The Royal Shakespeare Company‘s theater adaptation of “The Buddha of Suburbia” had hard acts to follow, coming after an acclaimed novel and TV series.

Hanif Kureishi‘s Whitbread Award-winning 1990 novel is one of the seminal works of British literature. The London-set story revolves around 17-year-old Karim — whose father is Indian and mother is English — and his journey in a 1970s Britain, which was becoming increasingly racist and intolerant.

Emma Rice and Kureishi penned the adaptation, with Rice directing. The adaptation process was interrupted when Kureishi had an accident in late 2022, and was left without the use of his arms and legs.

The work continued remotely after his partial recovery. Rice, who was artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe before founding her own theater company, Wise Children, has considerable experience in adaptations with the most recent being “Blue Beard,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Wise Children” and “Malory Towers.” “The book was really important to me, because it made me reframe my own childhood and my own experience growing up in an inner-city, multicultural area in the 1980s,” Rice told Variety of “The Buddha of Suburbia.” “History comes in waves, and I felt this was a really fabulous time to look back at the 1970s.” Rice approached Kureishi for the rights, and after taking his time to decide whether she was the right person, the author consented. “We’ve worked together on the adaptation, him just guiding me.