Rushdie devises stage version of famous novel

By PAUL TAYLOR

It has taken even longer than it took to write the original book," calculates Salman Rushdie, with a sardonic chuckle. Ten years after work began on the abortive television adaptation, the dramatised version of Midnight's Children, the novel that catapulted Rushdie to fame, fortune and Booker success in 1981, is on the vast stage of London's Barbican Theatre.

Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rushdie has devised a theatrical reworking of the text in collaboration with the director Tim Supple and the dramaturg Simon Reade.

I was led across the back of that vast, darkened Barbican stage in search of the author. Weaving past the neatly stacked scenery and props that will bring to life the first 34 years (1947-81) of independent India's existence, I bumped into a long table strewn with plates on which a half-eaten curry dinner is eternally glazed.

In the ghostly gloom, this spectacle had a surreal, posthumous look. It awaits the lighting that will jerk it into sticky, aromatic immediacy.

Sound cues - which alternated between deafening apocalyptic thunder and period-establishing pop were being tested. A calm presence at the centre of all this activity was the figure of Rushdie, who had an aura of understated confidence in the project in a black suit of enviably understated elegance.

The stage version of Midnight's Children has a cast of 20. Bulging with digressions and profligate subplots, the novel is the first-person testimony of Saleem, one of the eponymous babies who were born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment India gained its independence from Britain.

Rushdie was born in the same year and the book documents the destinies of a nation and a person through the first 34 years of a CV that begins with the carnage of Partition and closes with the collapse of Mrs Gandhi's heinous "Emergency".

Rushdie says labouring on the stage adaptation has been like communing with a younger self. "It's very interesting to take the editorial intelligence that I have now and try to bring it to bear on the imaginative work of the younger me."

The hero of Midnight's Children has a tragic-farcical conviction that he is individually responsible for momentous political events. Given the global turmoil over The Satanic Verses, I ask Rushdie if he now finds a spooky premonitory force in comments by Saleem, such as, "History ... history is my fault".

"There's even a poet who has to go into hiding in a cellar in this work," he says. So is his fiction uncannily predictive? "People keep telling me that about my books. And I wish they'd stop is all I can say."

Most of Rushdie's generation of writers despise stage drama. Martin Amis, for example, would enjoy a trip to the dentist more than a trip to the theatre. It becomes clear, though, that Rushdie is stage-struck. "I did much more acting than writing as a young man."

At Cambridge, he played, among other roles, a drag blonde with a black Zapata moustache. "But I think in the end I was temperamentally inclined to sit in a room by myself and write."

Saluted by Supple as an easy and open collaborator, he seems to be relishing this holiday from authorial solitude. "You have to park the ego in car park three and start finding out what works on stage and what doesn't," he says.

Since September 11, 2001, Rushdie, who now lives in New York, has attacked what he sees as the facile anti-Americanism of British intellectuals.

There is one improvement in the world since Midnight's Children was first published. In 1981, says Rushdie, it would have been difficult to cast a stage version. Now there is a wealth of British-Asian acting talent to choose from.

- INDEPENDENT