Midnight's Children, Barbican Theatre

Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children won the Booker in 1981. It landed the all-time "Booker of Bookers" in 1993. By rights, it would already be a movie and television series, but, partly because of shameful political obstacles (such as India banning filming) all attempts to transfer it to video tape and celluloid have so far come to grief.

The screen's loss should now prove to be the stage's gain, with the world premiere last night of the new theatrical adaptation devised by Rushdie, the director Tim Supple and the dramatist, Simon Reade.

But the event is only a very partial success. Supple's colourful and committed RSC production takes us on a dogged and over-restrained tour of the history of India from 1919 through the first 34 years of its independent life (1947-81) from Partition to the collapse of Mrs Gandhi's iniquitous state of emergency. The not-so- reliable guide is Saleem (a slightly and rightly irritating tour de forceby Zubin Varla), who is one of the eponymous babies born at the stroke of that August midnight when India gained its freedom from Britain.

For all its energy and attack, the production is deficient in true dramatic dynamism. Padma (Sameena Zehra), the pickle lady in the frame narration, all too often has to hang around as a spectator. A story that takes more than 100 pages to catch up with its official start may be comic in a Tristram Shandy-esque novel; a theatre piece that takes a great deal of its first half to do the same just gets wearying. The adaptation and the staging make artful use of mixed media in a flow of live action, newsreel footage of historical events, shadow-play and specially filmed episodes. But there's not enough joy or jolting discontinuity in this procedure. There's one episode where a teasingly naughty, censor-circumventing black-and-white movie, The Lovers of Kashmir, is interrupted by the news of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination and the film turns coloured with the characters on screen sharing (humorously) in the live consternation.

But in general there's not enough convention-violating interaction between the media.

There's also very much a them-and-us atmosphere in the huge Barbican Theatre. You long for the cast to be able to mingle amongst us promiscuously, as they could at a venue like the Young Vic.

I do not think that the adaptation or the production are fundamentally misconceived and I hope that Midnight's Childrenwill loosen and warm up. The show does not lack the courage of its convictions. What it needs is a bit of recklessness.