Word: forster
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since it appeared in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India has come to be recognized as one of the finest novels of the century. Given the possibilities in the book, it was perhaps inevitable that some one would write a play based upon it, and some one has, with astonishing results . Santha Rama Rau's stage adaptation of A Passage to India is-not to put too fine a point on matters-superb. She has taken only the hard, tight plot of the book and fashioned of it a play crackling with enormous, concentrated tension, an exciting...
Part of the reason why A Passage to India is such a great success as a play is that the novel is quite a different sort of achievement from anything else that Forster has written. It is a political and a social work, both the least personal and the most dramatically constructed of his novels. There is less creation, less imagining in it than you would expect from Forster, and more careful, studied understanding of what a people ruled by aliens is really like. If the message of Howard's End was that private relationships are all, that men must...
What you are most likely to miss in a play made from a Forster novel is the figure of Forster himself, one of the most politely intrusive of modern novelists. You will miss his voice and his modest, fair comments on the story he is creating...
This is a real loss, and must have presented a difficult problem for Santha Rama Rau-not simply because of all the eloquent and evocative passages that are left out, all the descriptions of India and its spirit, but also because the absence of Forster himself on the stage means that his story becomes slanted. Of course in the novel, plot and conflict couldn't be more clear. There is no doubt whose side is the right one, which set of people are more human. You must immediately dislike the British, admire the renegades from the compound...
...stage. Sir Michael Redgrave lends luster to Graham Greene's otherwise mediocre The Complaisant Lover. John Mills is arriving this month in Ross, Terence Rattigan's play about Lawrence of Arabia, and Eric (Separate Tables) Portman is headed again for Broadway in an adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India...