Zadie Smith crossed with ‘Mamma Mia!’
It was published in 2000, made an overnight sensation of its 24-year-old author, Zadie Smith, who had completed it during her final year at Cambridge and was touted as “the new Salman Rushdie”. Now White Teeth, one of the bestselling and most culturally significant novels of the Noughties, finally gets a theatrical adaptation – 16 years after the acclaimed Channel 4 miniseries – and achieves a kind of homecoming.
The Kiln Theatre (until recently the Tricycle) sits on Kilburn High Road (referenced in the novel), and is only a stroll away from Smith’s original “manor”, Willesden, where much of the book is set, and essentially lies in the same melting-pot part of north London, every shopfront its own migrant story.
The challenge facing adaptor Stephen Sharkey (working with director Indhu Rubasingham) is twofold: firstly, how to condense a novel that teems with characters and incidents (relayed with much exuberant, often comic, descriptive delight); and what to do with a busy time-scheme that jumps from 1975 to the now-remote early Nineties – with a detour to the Second World War.
The temptation, seized on here, is to take the action further on into the present.
While this innovation provides a vantage-point from which to then rewind and unfold a key cluster of scattered moments, there’s a jerkiness and mania about the approach that sits at odds with the easeful flow of the original.
More than that, bringing things up to-date, without providing much sense of the post-9/11 world, compounds the sense of disjunction. White Teeth is suffused with a sophisticated wryness that takes the measure of multiculturalism’s challenges – but even so it belongs, in its youth and buoyancy, to the heyday of New Labour.
The production, delivered on a cheerful, cartoonish reproduction of the main road outside (courtesy of Tom Piper, part-responsible for the Tower of London’s epic torchlit First World War installation this week), foregrounds the incidental bag-lady character of “Mad Mary”, described in the original as “a black voodoo woman with a red face … who performs her spells from a bin in West Hampstead”.
Reluctantly plonked into a dentist’s chair, this wild prophesier of impending judgment (played with a cherishable crazed air by Michele Austin) grabs a medical syringe and jabs her dental supervisor. The fluid sends the latter – Amanda Wilkins’ newly, confusedly preggers Rosie (a specially created character) – into an hallucinogenic spin through the past
If that sounds a bit Mamma Mia!, the bursting into songs (composed by Paul Englishby, each helping to provide the chronological leaps with the right retro flavour) comes from the same stable of feelgood populism. “Feelgood” can be infectious, but here it’s so virulent that I found that instant resistance kicked in, only finally to subside in the face of the tireless cast’s warm-hearted persistence.
Running through the novel is the race-straddling friendship between Bangladeshi restaurant-waiter Samad and his old white British pal from the war – the initially adrift, divorced and suicidal Archie.
Telling incidental details are nicely caught – “What kind of world do I want my sons to grow up in – they speak that dreadful street language, they eat that junkie food,” complains Tony Jayawardena’s Samad, just as he’s served a dollop of English breakfast. But does the evening make you care enough about the divisions that grow between his two boys, Magid and Millat, symbolic of wider tendencies of assimilation and (fundamentalist) rejection? I’m not sure it does.
Approached as a species of upmarket panto, the show works, but amid the theatrical heave-ho something of the book’s era-grappling seriousness gets lost.
It was worth a try, then. It’s worth a look. But is it also worth another draft?
‘Feelgood can be infectious, but here it’s so virulent that I found that instant resistance kicked in’