Word: rama
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...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 drama which yet retains much...
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...
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...
...Sita, wife of Rama, was kidnaped by Ravana, but later proved by a trial by fire that she was still virtuous. Lakshmi was the consort of Vishnu and the goddess of wealth and luck. The Rani of Jhansi fought the British in the 1857 Indian mutiny, was killed in battle...
Died. Guy Goldthorp Butler, 74, an Iowa politician who was known as "the shirtsleeve senator" of the state's upper house, where coat and tie is the rule, once a practicing dentist whose five-year career as tooth puller to the royal household of King Rama VI of Siam ended in 1921 when an auto accident injured his arm; of a heart attack; in Des Moines...