‘Although I’m tetraplegic, I’ve started to feel normal’: Hanif Kureishi on staging The Buddha of Suburbia
It’s been an unfathomably difficult 18 months for Hanif Kureishi. In 2022, the esteemed British writer went to Rome with his wife for Christmas, where he fainted and fell. When he woke up in a pool of blood he had lost the use of his hands, arms and legs. For more than a year, he was confined to hospital beds, questioned and prodded by doctors and nurses. He couldn’t sit, he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t pick up a pen to write.
So I’m struck by the optimism and humour of the man speaking to me over Zoom this morning. When I join the call, Kureishi is sitting erectly in his kitchen and joking with theatre director Emma Rice about their new stage adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which opens at the RSC’s Swan theatre this week. It turns out the long months of convalescence – Kureishi has spent time in five hospitals, undergone spinal surgery, and only returned to his home last December – haven’t dampened his creative spirit.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think,” he says. “Particularly when I was in hospital and it was so boring. Hours and hours of the day would go by with literally nothing for me to do. I can’t use my hands. I can’t play with my phone.
I can’t play music. I can’t send emails to people. I’m just sitting staring at the wall. But staring at the wall is a very good way of generating creativity.”
Kureishi now uses a motorised wheelchair and has a carer, meaning he has only made it to three rehearsals, yet the project has renewed his sense of purpose. “It’s really cheered me up that Emma is doing this play,” the 69-yearold says in his typically wry and concise manner. “It makes me very happy that my work is still alive after I nearly died. It also seems amazing that this book has survived for so long, that the story, the politics, the social background and culture are still of interest to people.”
Published in 1990, Kureishi’s debut novel was a sensation, praised by readers for its relatability and by critics for its satirical humour and social commentary. The semi-autobiographical story follows Karim Amir, a mixed-race teenager desperate to escape Bromley for a more exciting life in a less suburban part of London. Over the course of five years, Karim navigates his relationships with friends and family – including his father, a comical guru-like figure who teaches his neighbours about Buddhist discipline – while experiencing a range of sexual and social awakenings.
“It’s rather like what The Catcher in the Rye was for young people in the US,” Kureishi muses. “There’s something about Karim’s voice, his naivety, his vulnerability, and the idea of this kid emerging from a suburban house into a world of ambition and politics and sexuality that is very seductive. Everyone can identify with it.”
Karim faces hurdles in the book that mirror Kureishi’s own – like having to juggle two worlds and cultures, the Indian and English. Kureishi’s father came from a wealthy Indian background, moved to Pakistan after partition and then to London, where he met Kureishi’s English mother. Kureishi was the only child of colour in his school in the 1960s and endured racism and xenophobia. He was 14 when Enoch Powell made his “terrifying” rivers of blood speech.
In response, the youngster turned to books, music and fashion as a means of escape, which in turn equipped him with an ability to capture the cultural and social environment around him. For his efforts, Buddha won the Whitbread award for best first novel and was made into a BBC series soundtracked by fellow Bromley boy David Bowie. “There was one copy going round our school like contraband,” Zadie Smith once recalled.
“It’s one of the best modern stories there is,” says Rice, who was artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe from 2016 to 2018, before she founded the Wise Children theatre company. “It’s like a modern-day Hamlet. I read it when I was 23 and it blew my mind. It was like a bomb dropping culturally. It’s so funny, so political and so tender.”
The pair’s collaboration should be distinctive. Kureishi, whose other notable works include the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette (earning him an Oscar nomination for the screenplay) and the 1998 novel Intimacy, which saw him described by the New York Times as a “postcolonial Philip Roth”. Meanwhile Rice, whose directorial credits include The Red Shoes and Wu