Word: aziz
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...Among his guests are a pair of British ladies-who want to see India. One of them, lanky, pink, ditherish Miss Quested (Anne Meacham), who has come from England to be married; and Mrs. Moore (Gladys Cooper), the mother of Miss Quested's fiancé. They meet Dr. Aziz (expertly played by Zia Mohyeddin), a Moslem who is young, charming, overemotional, awkward and desperately anxious to please. His position, India's and Britain's are dryly summed up by two incidents. Before the ladies come, Fielding cannot find his back collar stud, and the puppyish Aziz plucks...
...ladies have not yet learned the Anglo-Indian's snobbery, and they accept Dr. Aziz's impulsive invitation to visit some local caves. Here the effort of compression undoes the adapter. In the novel, the reader is made to understand that each woman is already under a severe strain. Old Mrs. Moore's is the approach of death and the retreat of God; Miss Quested's is an incomprehension of love. When the heat, the smells, and the frightening echoes turn Mrs. Moore abruptly into a benumbed old sibyl and induce Miss Quested to believe that...
...trial of Dr. Aziz is done caustically, and here the audience is somewhat better prepared for Miss Quested's sudden shift-this time to relative sanity. The final scene is a superb measuring of tensions between two men, but it is oddly disappointing. Fielding and Aziz, who has been cleared, come to see that the injustices of other men-of victor and victims-have doomed their friendship. They part in sadness, and the play trails off (as the novel does not) in the unsubstantiated hope that tomorrow will be better...
...Aziz's trial is done well. The principles are perfect, and the scene is an ingeniously constructed one in which Adela Quested realizes her mistake and withdraws the charge against Aziz-leaving the British angry and spiteful and the Indians exuberant and spiteful. Fielding and Aziz hold a strained conversation in which it becomes all too apparent that they never will be friends again until the Empire dissolves, and maybe not even then...
...Mohyeddin, a young actor from Karachi and the star of the 1960 English production of the play, brings one of Forster's most brilliant characters to life. He is surely Aziz, whose moods flow like water, who desires to please his friends even at the price of lying, who lives closer to his feelings than ever the British can, whose corroding fear that he has no dignity almost ruins him and provides Forster with his subtlest and angriest plea against the subjection of a race...