Newsnight Review discussed Salman Rushdie's new play, showing at the Barbican.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Midnight's Children, adapted by Salman Rushdie, Simon Reade and Tim Supple, who also directed it. Germaine, we're very used to versions of novels on TV and film. It's less usual on stage. Does this one work?

GERMAINE GREER:
It is a huge thing to try to do, to take a great novel, which is now generally regarded as the one great post-colonial novel, it's the foundation of every course in post-colonialism and post-colonialist literature. It has an iconic status, and one of the most important things about the book is the whole context that it brings in, its dense linguistic texture. This is what we expect from Salman, this amazing ebullience and extraordinary tissue of language. Once he decided to turn it into a play, I it becomes this little booklet. Then you realise that what you are left with is the schematic story of the hero and his strange birth, and the fact that he is a changeling and so on. You get the magic realist nugget of this rather crazy plot. In fact it is like Dynasty in tribal costume. I found it uninteresting from that point of view.

MARK LAWSON:
Bill Buford, they found a non-white cast and are trying to find a non-white audience. All of those are commendable things, but does it live up to those intentions?

BILL BUFORD:
There is nothing else like this on the stage anywhere. That was what was appealing for me, because if you step back and see what else is like this. There is nothing as ambitious, as informed by history, ideas, a sense of humour, a whole area of experience that you're not finding represented anywhere else on the stage. You've got a cast of 20 people. It's an exceptional moment in British cultural history to find that kind of production here. It had problems. It is long, and there is a sort of adage that bad books make good movies, and good books make bad movies, and the same could be applied to the theatre in some ways. The subtlety of a good book is very hard to translate to the stage, but I thought it was terrific.

MARK LAWSON:
Andrew Lloyd Webber got there with Bombay Dreams, they may have waited too long to do this.

PAUL MORLEY:
It is squashed down into that, but it's still very long, 3 � hours. When the first half finished, I was quite happy, I thought we could go, but then I swapped seats with Germaine for the second half, and Salman Rushdie was sat in front of us, so I had the rather strange experience of watching the stage as if it on top of his head, as if it was all coming out of his brain, which I enjoyed for a while. It made it go with a bang. For me, sometimes, it seemed like a Goodness Gracious Me sketch, as if it had been written by Stanley Baxter. It was not that funny, but wanting to be funny. I find that with Rushdie in general, that whatever he aims to do, I never feel that he actually achieves it up to the genius that he clearly is in some senses, and clearly wants to be. For instance, the Apocalypse Now sequence, in the Bangladesh war, seemed very clumsy and cack-handed. It is a series of jarred pickles, it is a series of courses that keep coming. But they do keep coming, so it is like a 52-course meal, so at the end of it you are very bloated.

MARK LAWSON:
Bill, it's incredibly episodic as Paul suggests. You get a lot about the what of Indian and Pakistan history, but very little of the why, I felt.

BILL BUFORD:
The what and the why were there, but it is episodic. It is in the nature of it. It is very difficult, with a book and author so famous, to see the play just as a play. It evoked the book, which is a very rich experience, but I was also struck by the fact that we all know so much more about the author than we would have done if this thing had been presented neutrally. We know that, in a way, that this is part of his autobiography, and not unlike the narrator on the stage, he grew up in India, then moved to Pakistan, and the issues of the Muslim and non-Muslim world are at the heart of what he's doing. It is very hard to see this simply as a play.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine, one of the things we know is that there was going to a BBC version of this which was the foundation for the script, and I thought they gave too much of that away. They used these film inserts, which rather give away its earlier failure.

GERMAINE GREER:
I would have used many more of them. I am not sure about finding a non-white audience in England, because from some points of view this is offensive to Indians, people from the subcontinent. One of Salman's issues, as we now say instead of problems, is the strange impact of English culture with Indian culture, and the way it gets misunderstood. It is a joke he loves to play, and he also loves to faintly caricature it. He could say it was a loving caricature, but it comes down to a kind of stereotype, which I think someone like Meera Syal, for example, would find offensive.

MARK LAWSON:
I saw it with an almost wholly British Asian audience, it was a charity performance, and they responded to it. They did not seem to find it offensive.

GERMAINE GREER:
Oh, good. So much the better. I cannot judge from that point of view. I felt I wanted more context. I did not have a clear feeling of India, let alone a clear feeling of what it was like to be in India one minute and in Pakistan the next.

PAUL MORLEY:
I thought it was quite Attenboroughesque in that sense. The lead character reminded me a lot of Ben Kingsley. He had that slightly Alec Guinness edge to him.

MARK LAWSON:
Oh, Richard! I was thinking of David Attenborough. We need to move along. Midnight's Children continues at the Barbican until February 23, and then tours the country.