RSC The Buddha of Suburbia review - Celebrating the theatre of life in an unceasingly inventive carnival

​If a mark of good art is that it can be interpreted in wildly different fashions while retaining its message, then The Buddha of Suburbia is very good indeed.

​Hanif Kureishi’s novel from 1990 was made into a BBC television drama in 1993. There was some confected tabloid scandal around it, owing to its supposedly outrageous sexual content. But it had a general air of understatement, the humour dry, the overall feel, despite some of the extraordinariness depicted, natural and realistic.

Now it has hit the stage; and, superficially at least, it could hardly be more different. It is directed and adapted by Emma Rice, known for her theatrical abandon and exuberance, and in theory this perhaps ought not to work: she and the more mordant Kureishi seem an odd couple, like an exclamation mark collaborating with a full stop. But at the heart of The Buddha of Suburbia is a profound lust for love and life; and here, Rice and Kureishi find fertile common ground.

At the centre of the story is Karim, a young man who has “emerged from two old histories,” with an English mother and an Indian father. It is the 1970s, and despite everything – industrial unrest, political turbulence, the National Front – there is a fair bit of hope in the air. Karim finds it in his friends and lovers and music. It is as if Karim pieces his life together from the shards and fragments of the world he inhabits and the contrasting worlds of his parents; like a kaleidoscope, the merest twist changes the image.

He undergoes one unsettling and subtly life-changing experience after another. He sees and hears his father having sex with another woman: “I was OK about the sex. But the laughter stuck in my throat.” He has various sexual escapades with men and women. An aspiring actor, he lands a role in a production of The Jungle Book, a work despised by some of his friends for its colonial outlook. Later, he gets flak for supposedly reinforcing racist stereotypes; to him, he’s just telling the story of his life. A close friend never forgives him for failing to attend a protest against racism.

All this is played out in an unceasingly inventive carnival of theatre. There is a cartoonish quality to everything: the voices are loud, the clothes louder; all is radiant and bright and fast. The role of male genitalia is played by bananas (this production must be a boon to Stratford’s greengrocers). Music rages and soothes, pummels and strokes. You could call it anarchic, but that would be to overlook the tight craft and choreography involved in a work of such intricacy. The backstage crew come out with the cast to take their deserved ovation at the end.

And despite the apparent unsubtlety, the dazzling surface, this is deep stuff. It is a celebration of theatre itself: not as artifice, but as truth. Yes, this is colourful, but sometimes it is colourful like bruises or scars. The heightened atmosphere it conjures makes some scenes all the more brutal: a racist beating seems especially disturbing. Laughter and levity and lasciviousness abound; but this is by no means a flippant production.

It is held together with endless likeability by Dee Ahluwalia as Karim; the rest of the cast play multiple characters with great verve. ​At a time when hope seems scarce, Rice and Kureishi are daring us to find it again, and showing us where to look.

Until June 1. Tickets: 01789 331111​ or rsc.org.uk