Emma Rice on Working With Hanif Kureishi

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. He’s been really excellent in the process, making sure that I honor the politics of the book, not just the comedy or the enjoyment, really making sure that he’s steering me in the right direction,” Rice said.

The main challenge of adapting the 284-page novel for the stage was how to get through that much material in a meaningful way that wasn’t too rushed, Rice said. “I’m a firm believer that the theater should be a good night out, I don’t want to make people sit through three and a half hours of material. So making sure that it’s fun and entertaining and interesting, but also really making sure that all those characters are able to live and breathe and have the amazing nuance,” Rice added. “Of the long list of things I love about the book, I love how flawed all the characters are, and yet how much the book loves them. And I wanted my production to do the same, which is to allow the characters to have their quirks and their flaws, but for us to really love them by the end.”

Despite the material being set in the 1970s, “The Buddha of Suburbia” stage adaptation has a contemporaneous feel to it. Rice said that her initial idea was to begin the play when Karim is in the process of becoming an actor and using theater techniques to take the audience back in time. “Hanif said, ‘Look, Emma, this is very clever, but it’s political. And we need to allow the audience to understand the 1970s,’” Rice said.

Rice added that her response to what she describes as Kureishi’s “provocation” was to “really blend the issues that we’re still dealing with now, the Metropolitan police, racism, sexual grooming in theater and all sorts of industries. So to really pick out those themes — inflation, strikes — it felt really good to say to the audience, ‘Yes, this is a period piece, but watch it through today’s lens.’”

“The Buddha of Suburbia” opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon to ecstatic reviews and plays through June 1. It is likely to transfer to London’s West End.