FOR at least one generation, the ten long years Salman Rushdie spent hiding from the infamous fatwa, mean very little.
We weren’t quite old enough to understand the fury surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988. Our first real grasp of Islamic unrest – however limited it was to the few – arrived somewhere around September 11, 2001.
That’s certainly my experience and the reason I was intrigued to see Hanif Kureishi’s play, The Black Album, at Liverpool Playhouse.
But, while the play tried its best to evoke the spirit of that infamous decade, it ultimately failed. It could easily have been set 20 years later.
I blame the menagerie of characters. There were too many stereotypes and far too much happening to generate any sense of place or momentum.
We had the overprotective mother; the sinister yet pitiable local drug pusher; the hardline Irish Muslim; the hardline Geordie Muslim; the influential but strangely unengaging ringleader and, oh yeah, the quiet guy who ends up blowing the place sky high. Who knew?
