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Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel about growing up in 1970s Bromley is filled with sex, race, class, politics and family.
Emma Rice’s excellent adaptation treads lightly on these, keeping the youth and swagger of south London and adding frenetic humping with party poppers for orgasms, dance sequences that echo Bollywood and Dee Ahluwalia’s Karim framing the piece like a stand-up with mic and one-liners.
It’s joyous and filthy and casually political. Kureishi helped adapt the novel after the 2022 fall that paralysed him from the neck down.
It breaks your heart to watch Ahluwalia and company jump and dance and end with the book’s final line: “And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved… surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn’t always be this way.”
It’s the hope that will kill you every time.
