Salman Rushdie: A child of our times

Salman Rushdie's new play of his novel 'Midnight's Children' has its world premiere in London tonight. The author tells Paul Taylor about its birth pangs

It has taken even longer than it took to write the original book," calculates Salman Rushdie, with a sardonic chuckle. Now, though, the protracted, tortuous process is nearly over. Tonight, a mere 10 years after work began on the abortive television adaptation, the public will at last be able to view a dramatised version of Midnight's Children, the novel that catapulted Rushdie to fame, fortune and Booker success in 1981. But instead of on the small screen, it's on the vast stage of London's Barbican Theatre that this classic gets its first airing in a new medium. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rushdie has devised a theatrical reworking of the text in collaboration with the director Tim Supple and the dramaturg Simon Reade.

Last Friday lunchtime, I was led across the back of that vast, darkened Barbican stage in search of the author. Weaving past the neatly stacked scenery and props that will bring to life the first 34 years (1947-81) of independent India's existence, I bumped into a long table strewn with plates on which a half-eaten curry dinner is eternally glazed. In the ghostly gloom, this spectacle had a surreal, posthumous look. It awaits the lighting that will jerk it into sticky, aromatic immediacy.

Although it was lunchtime, the technicians were evidently working through. Sound cues – which alternated between deafening apocalyptic thunder and period-establishing pop ("You know you got it/ If it makes you feel goo-oo-ood") were being tested over and over again. A calm presence, at the centre of all this activity, was the figure of Salman Rushdie, who was wearing both an aura of understated confidence in the project and a black suit of enviably understated elegance.

It's clear from his fiction that Rushdie enjoys playing games with form. So, while we were waiting for Tim Supple to emerge from giving notes, I risked starting the interview with a parenthesis. I wanted to verify a rumour about those dark post-fatwa days when Rushdie was in deepest hiding with a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head. The story, a wonderful black joke, is that one of the novelist's Special Branch bodyguards turned out to be an aspiring (and ferociously untalented) amateur fiction-writer. So, on top of everything else, Rushdie had found himself literally the captive audience of a man with a pile of unreadable manuscripts and a hunger for creative writing tuition.

"No, not true, not true," he laughs. "What did happen was that one of the Special Branch men went on to college to do a doctoral thesis on Post-Colonial Literature, sort of as a result. And I believe he had to write about The Satanic Verses." Was he pestered for inside information? "No, these people are very, very discreet. They live in people's intimate lives and they know they are not supposed to be there. Discretion is bred in the bone." Rushdie later says that working on this production has been such fun that he's thinking of writing an original play. I suggest that that apocryphal story would make an excellent two-hander.

The stage version of Midnight's Children has, by contrast, a huge cast of 20. Bulging with digressions and profligate subplots, the novel is the first-person testimony of Saleem, one of the eponymous babies who were born on the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, at the precise moment India gained its independence from Great Britain. Rushdie was born in the same year ("Actually, I'm older than India – by eight weeks," he says) and the book documents the intertwined destinies of a nation and a person through the first 34 years of a CV that begins with the carnage of Partition and closes with the collapse of Mrs Gandhi's heinous "Emergency".

To say that a lot has happened to India and to Rushdie since he wrote the book is an understatement. One very personal way in which his native country has wounded him was its ban on the BBC filming any footage there for projected TV version of Midnight's Children. "If I were writing the book now, the ending would have been darker. In India, when it was published, they tended to say the conclusion was too pessimistic. But, as it turned out, events there have been so much worse than anything the book suggests." Labouring on the stage adaptation has, he says, been like communing with a younger self. "It's very interesting to take the editorial intelligence that I have now and try to bring it to bear on the imaginative work of the younger me."

The hero of Midnight's Children has a tragic-farcical conviction that he is individually responsible for momentous political events. Given the global turmoil over The Satanic Verses, I ask Rushdie if he now finds a spooky premonitory force in comments by Saleem such as "History... history is my fault". "There's even a poet who has to go into hiding in a cellar in this work," he says. So is his fiction uncannily predictive? "People keep telling me that about my books. And I wish they'd stop, is all I can say."

The theatrical version has an intriguing history. As Tim Supple explains, "The stage adaptation is in part an adaptation of Salman's television screenplay [five hour-long episodes] as well as an adaptation of the book." There's a lot of cinema in the novel, both as subject and technique, and one advantage of a stage version is that it can include film and play games with it. "In many ways," says Rushdie, "the theatre has made it so much easier to do and is more in the spirit of the book than television because of this sense of mixed media." His earlier screenplay had even used stage conventions. In that, Saleem, the narrator, would on occasion step into a freeze-frame "and merge with his own image". In the theatre, he can slip with infinite fluidity between narrative address and re-enactment.

Most of Rusdie's generation of writers despise stage drama. Martin Amis, for example, would enjoy a trip to the dentist more than a trip to the theatre. It becomes clear, though, that Rushdie himself is quite stage-struck. "I did much more acting than writing as a young man." At Cambridge, he played, among other roles, a drag blonde with a black Zapata moustache. "But I think in the end I was temperamentally inclined to sit in a room by myself and write." Saluted by Supple as an easy and open collaborator, he seems to be relishing this vacation from authorial solitude. "You have to park the ego in Car Park Three and start finding out what works on stage and what doesn't," he says.

With American co-production money, the RSC staging of Midnight's Children will, in addition to touring this country, play in Michigan and at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Since September 11, Rushdie, who now lives in New York, has attacked what he sees as the facile anti-Americanism of British intellectuals. These are strange days indeed. At one time, it would have been inconceivable to discover his friend Christopher Hitchens, the dedicatee of his latest volume of essays, Step Across this Line, on the same side of any argument as George Dubya. Where does Rushdie stand on the threatened war with Iraq? "Well, Christopher is by nature a polemicist, so he finds it easy to take strong views," he says. But I find this a very dark and ambiguous affair. I don't have a simple view. I think it's quite possible there could be a beneficial outcome for the people of Iraq as the result of an extremely self-centred and wrongly motivated invasion." The war, he says, may have been fought and finished by the time the production reaches the US in late March.

There is one indisputable improvement in the world since Midnight's Children was first published. Back in 1981, says Rushdie, it would have been extremely difficult to cast a stage version. Now there is a wealth of trained British-Asian acting talent to choose from. The cast have been optioned for a possible foreign tour. It would be good, if perhaps a trifle optimistic, to think that one day this version will be able to play in the city that is the source of its cornucopian inspiration: Bombay.

'Midnight's Children' is at the Barbican Theatre, London EC2 (020-7836 1443) to 22 February