Salman Rushdie Catches the Playwriting Bug???
Date: 30 January 2003
Salman Rushdie - whose stage adaptation of his own Booker Prize-winning novel
Midnight's Children has just received its world premiere - is keen to flex more of his dramatic muscles. At last night's opening of the Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican, he described working with director
Tim Supple and dramaturg
Simon Reade on the adaptation as "the greatest experience of my creative life" and one that has given him "the itch to write more plays". The author says that after completing his current novel, which he postponed during rehearsals, he'd like to try writing an original play. It's also his dream to transfer
Midnight's Children to India, taking it to Delhi, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The book of
Midnight's Children, which was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993, firmly established Rushdie's reputation as one of Britain's leading contemporary novelists. His other titles have included
Shame, The Moor's Last Sigh, East/West, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and, most famously, 1989's
The Satanic Verses, which so angered Muslims that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini declared a "fatwah" against Rushdie. According to the author, after 25 years of the solitary work of novel-writing, he has been enjoying immensely the collaboration of staging a play. Let's hope his enthusiasm hasn't dimmed this morning with the papers' mixed reviews of his first theatrical foray.
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