White Teeth review – Zadie Smith's 'multiculti' melting pot boils over

Kiln, LondonStephen Sharkey adapts Smith’s immigrant tale with zest but struggles to contain the novel’s dizzying temporal leaps Adapting Zadie Smith’s phenomenal novel for the stage is like trying to harness a whirlwind. The book leaps back and forth in time between 1945 and 1999 and offers multiple perspectives on what Smith calls the “immigrant experiment”. Stephen Sharkey’s stage version, with songs by Paul Englishby, captures something of the book’s buoyancy but inevitably feels as if it is trying to squeeze a whole narrative flood into a pint pot.Sharkey adopts a dual framing-device. The story is seen partly through the coma-induced eyes of Rosie Jones, a dentist delving into her mixed-race family’s past. Continue reading…
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