The Buddha of Suburbia has the most inventive sex scenes in the city

Review and star rating of The Buddha of Suburbia: ★★★★★

London’s only theater titan Emma Rice might convince an audience to suspend their disbelief when a party popper symbolizes someone having an orgasm. Of course – why wouldn’t it? Newly arrived in London after a performance at The RSC Swan, Stratford upon Avon earlier this year, The Buddha of Suburbia is London’s most inventive show, but while its themes are serious, Rice certainly isn’t. Do you dare use a banana to imitate an erection, Emma! What a cliché! But she does it all, and pulls it off.

I make The Buddha of Suburbia sound like a sex show. It is. It’s certainly refreshingly full of interesting ways to stage hanky-panky, but in reality it uses carnality as a bellwether for the sexual revolution of the 1970s by telling the story of a young, questioning bisexual man of Indian descent. He lives in a London changing to a new rhythm and pushes back on his family’s conservative values. All the contradictory, loving people here exist in all our living rooms.

Rice goes beyond the carnal and creates extreme beauty: puppet foxes and birds represent the richness of nature in our capital; surreal dance skits break the fourth wall through protagonist Karim’s story of his own life and house parties throb with warm, inviting tones in which men and women in their forties act like teenagers (Rice has deliciously stacked them on top of each other in a display of countercultural connection). Rice has a unique skill in staging the surreal; the worlds in our imagination change with the worlds presented to us.

The Buddha of Suburbia: These contradictory, loving people exist in all our living rooms

Within this apparently warm and sloppy, hippie-tinged utopia, progressive ideas tear holes in family units. Writer/co-adapter Hanif Kureishi’s script shines with a series of well-realized characters brimming with contradictions. There’s the Indian uncle who can be tyrannical in his assertions of family values ​​to Karim, but who is vulnerable to the coercion and casual racism of his often insufferable white yoga crush, and the handsome young queer man who encourages Karim’s approach but can’t handle the reality . strange intimacy, nor much else of his own life. Everyone is bumbling around making terrible decisions until it finally seems like everything is going to be okay and then there is the most nerve-wracking utopia; an exquisite pathos. Dee Ahluwalia conducts this meta-research as if he were actually at a house party, frothing with playful confidence.

The Buddha of Suburbia is a lightning bolt back to the rhythms of the 1970s, but it would be a mistake to condemn Kureishi’s 1990 text to the past. Karim is so many young people today.

The Buddha of Suburbia plays on the Barbican Theatre until November 16

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