The Buddha of Suburbia review and star rating: ★★★★★
Only London theatre titan Emma Rice could convince an audience to suspend their disbelief when a party popper symbolises someone ejaculating. Of course – why wouldn’t it? Freshly arriving in London after a run at The RSC Swan, Stratford upon Avon earlier this year, The Buddha of Suburbia is the most inventive show in London, but while the themes are serious, Rice is defiantly not. Dare you to use a banana to imitate an erection, Emma! What a cliché! But she does it all, and pulls it off.
I’m making The Buddha of Suburbia sound like a sex show. It kind of is. It’s certainly refreshingly full of interesting ways to stage hanky-panky, but really, it uses carnality as a bellwether for the sexual revolution of the 1970s by telling the story of one young questioning bisexual man of Indian heritage. Living in a London changing to a new beat, he’s pushing back on the conservative values of his family. All of the contradictory, loving people here exist in all of our living rooms.
Directorially, Rice goes beyond the carnal to forge utter beauty: puppet foxes and birds imagine the bounty of our capital’s wildlife; surrealist dance skits break the fourth wall through protagonist Karim’s narration of his own life and house parties throb with warm, inviting hues where men and women in their forties act like teenagers (Rice has them delightfully piled atop one another in displays of counter-cultural connection). Rice has a singular skill for staging the surreal; morphing the worlds inside our imaginations with the worlds we’re presented with.
The Buddha of Suburbia: these contradictory, loving people exist in all of our living rooms
Within this seemingly warm and squishy hippy-hued utopia, progressive ideas tear holes in family units. Writer/co-adaptor Hanif Kureishi’s script shines with a raft of properly realised characters who bubble over with contradictions. There’s the Indian uncle who can be tyrannical in his assertions of family values towards Karim but who is vulnerable to the coercion and casual racism of his often insufferable white yoga crush, and the hot young queer man who encourages Karim’s approaches but cannot handle the reality of queer intimacy, nor much else of his own life. Everyone’s bumbling around making terrible decisions until it finally seems like things might be fine and then there’s the most unnerving utopia; an exquisite pathos. Dee Ahluwalia conducts this meta examination like he’s actually at a house party, just frothing with playful confidence.
The Buddha of Suburbia is a thunderbolt back to the rhythms of the seventies, but it’d be a mistake to condemn Kureishi’s 1990 text to the past. Karim is so many young people today.
The Buddha of Suburbia plays at the Barbican Theatre until 16 November
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