The South African actor John Kani once told director Greg Doran he believed Julius Caesar was Shakespeare’s “African play”. So convinced was Doran that, soon after, he staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company an entirely convincing version of the play about the Roman emperor set in Africa.
You can’t help but be similarly convinced by Tanika Gupta’s argument, which she lays out against a beautiful stage design from Rosa Maggiora, that Great Expectations is, quite clearly, Charles Dickens’ Indian novel. The milieu fits the often-told tale like a lace glove.
Dickens, the great chronicler of British class, has provided a framework that Gupta exploits with depth and nuance to find deeper, unexpected resonances where the story of Pip, who here becomes Pipli, still examines class injustices but also has something to say about colonialism, Indian independence, partition and the role of the invader.
It’s a big task to grapple with so many subjects, and the story sometimes sprawls over its almost three-hour running time, but thanks to deft direction from Pooja Ghai it never drags. Gupta and Ghai previously collaborated on The Empress at the RSC – where that production sometimes skimmed across the surface of the story, here they dig into each aspect of the several tales woven together.
Much hangs on the performance of Esh Alladi as Pipli, the young boy who rescues an escaped convict and finds himself repaid many times over. Alladi does an earnest job without ever quite crossing the footlights to truly connect with the audience, while the cast around him make much of their smaller parts, particularly the always reliable Andrew French as Malik (or, as Dickens had him, Magwitch) and Catherine Russell with a surprisingly comic turn as Miss Havisham.
Gupta’s lived experience means the religious and cultural specificity of the characters is authentic in a way that adaptations of such stories are often not. The result might leave some sections of the audience who are less au fait with the cultural traditions of the characters or the partition of Bengal in 1905 scratching their heads, but if it leads to further investigation, and it probably will, then Gupta has achieved something quite impressive here.
At the Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, until 7 October
