Volume 10, Issue 2

First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.

Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.

Tanika Gupta’s varied work as a playwright encompasses transadaptation in a range of forms. This article will focus on two of her plays, Hobson’s Choice (2003/2019) and Wah! Wah! Girls (2012), exploring the ways in which she depicts representations of South Asian communities in Britain in different ways. Hobson’s Choice reworks the original 1916 play to being set among the Bengali community working in the rag trade in Salford. The play focuses on the father of the family, Hari Hobson, who runs a clothing factory and lives with his three daughters. The 2019 reworking of the play changes the setting to a Ugandan Asian family in Manchester in 1987. Wah! Wah! Girls is set in East London, having been commissioned as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Focusing on a mujra -style dancing club and the different communities surrounding it, the play includes transadaptations of well-known dance routines from Bollywood films integrated into the action, playing on nostalgia and familiarity for South Asian communities, as well as offering a picture of contemporary multicultural London. Both plays, in different ways, use transadaptation of setting and form to examine what it means to be British and Asian in different contexts, and this article will analyse whether this is successful in creating a meaningful interrogation of the experience of British South Asians on stage.

Tanika Gupta’s engagement with the works of contemporary bicultural writers invigorates her longstanding project of “staging the intercultural” (Gupta and Sierz 38). This essay discusses the ways in which the author juxtaposes her voice with that of Meera Syal who, since the 1980 s, has helped to shape the burgeoning field of British Asian women’s writing, while also establishing a distinct British Asian presence in the media. Similar to Gupta’s own writing, Syal has addressed cultural hybridity in her work and exposed the faultlines within British society, thus bringing into the open a racialized sense of the nation that is embedded in the entanglement of its colonial and postcolonial history. This article discusses Gupta’s appropriation of Anita and Me (2015) as a significant contribution to consolidating an Asian British women’s writing tradition that through transmedial and intertextual strategies favours legacy and canon formation. By dramatizing Syal’s coming-of-age novel Anita and Me , originally published in 1996, Gupta expands this work beyond both its original narrative form and its context of publication. She infuses it with an afterlife that sheds new light on the novel, while strengthening its relevance for contemporary cross-cultural audiences.

This article explores the relationship between form, content, and politics. It challenges some significant positions by no lesser figures than Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller on the need for radical forms to function as a prerequisite for imagining alternatives to the prevailing sociopolitical order. The main focus for analysis is Alistair McDowall’s Pomona (2014), a much-produced and much-lauded play that certainly has an experimental dramaturgy, but one which serves more conservative political ends. The article goes on, however, to identify an instance of “the weird” in the play and argues that an element of content rather than an experimental form can call the world of the play into question.