Word: forster
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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...
...clear as all this is in the novel's outline, Forster's presence makes you less sure of your instincts; as he fills in the story, things begin to seem complicated. True, the English are hypocrites who cannot believe the natives are men like themselves, but they stand for a noble, if stupid, way of life based on service. Even the English girl whose foolish hallucination is the cause of so much bitterness is decent, if dull. And the Indians themselves-generations of subjection have made them children, with all that is appealing and discouragingly immature in children. If they...
...Forster, the gifted, intelligent observer of a nation, is thus cut from the play, but Santha Rama Rau has nearly solved the problem of his absence by an unbelievably skillful job of compressing and condensing his views into the speeches of her characters. Her play has shed much of his subtley, but his outlook remains: simplified, the play still tells us the complexity of India's tragedy. (Wherever possible, she has kept Forster's original dialogue, too-an admirable practice, since he is one of the few modern writers who can make characters sound natural when they are talking brilliantly...
What is wrong with this scene is the response of the actors who play the English. Forster wrote in anger about the Anglo-Indians, but he was not so imperceptive as the play and the production are here. What the actors should be talking about when they try to persuade Fielding to side with them is a way of life; they must show that they are unable to believe that the grand work of civilizing India which they have undertaken is largely humbug. Instead of their vision, we see only a rather dowdy collection of distasteful bigots...