Review: 'Midnight's Children' delivers riches to U-M audiences

If "matter is, as we now know, nothing but compressed energy," as Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1985 novel "Dynasty," it is fair to apply the same definition to the dramatization of his "Midnight's Children."

Presented on the Power Center for the Performing Arts stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for six performances March 12-16, Rushdie's ambitious adaptation contracts four generations of an Indian family into a 62-year timeline, as told by the third-generation Saleem Sinai, one of 1,001 children born in the first hour of India's toddling steps into independent statehood. These children, "midnight's children," are tethered together telepathically, and each possesses a supernatural power, be it the ability to change gender, eat metal or fly.

Saleem and Padma, played by Zubin Varla and Sameena Zebra, view history through a hole in a sheet of paper in "Midnight's Children." (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

As stand-ins for the tapestry that is the developing India, midnight's children themselves penetrate the story from all directions, but it is their interactions with the others on the stage, those not blessed/cursed by extraordinary birth–the spouses, the parents, the children of the children–in which the story lies.

In recent dialogue about his book and the play, reported at length in the March 17 University Record, Rushdie characterized his home nation. "India's turbulent and noisy and vulgar and crowded and unorthodox," he said. "It's a racket and it's a sexual assault–it's all these things." In the play, these disparate and vital aspects of the youthful land were lassoed onto the Power Center stage and made to be storytellers, too, through instantaneous scene changes, sparse but limber set dressing, video projection, shadow play, and interaction between those characters inhabiting the stage and those whose images appear on the mid-stage screen.

But rather than distract and overwhelm, the play–directed by Tim Supple, who, along with Simon Reade and Rushdie, was responsible for the dramatization–welcomes the audience in a multi-armed embrace. We're told the story of the life of Saleem Sinai, by Saleem Sinai, as he recounts the tale to Padma, his wife. By turns, Saleem rejoins the scenes he describes, flexing between past youth and present middle age, then rebounding back to the narrative present to refocus our attention.

The play engages India's spiritual life through the inclusion of many of its abundant gods. Shiva, the destroyer, is the Saleem doppelganger who is switched with his counterpart at birth; and Saleem, with his exceptionally large nose, careens in and out of the realm of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who is, appropriately, the patron saint of scholars, authors and thieves.

"Midnight's Children," with all it's bravado, sensuality and historical richness, has moved to Harlem, where it will be presented on the stage of the Apollo Theater through March 30. It is a joint production of RSC, U-M, the University Musical Society and Columbia University.

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