Doing a stage version of E. M. Forster's novel, A Passage to India, is a little like trying to rewrite the Bhagavad-Gita as a sonnet. In the 36 years since its publication, one of the 20th century's great novels has again and again mocked the attempts of adapters; its widespread profusion of scenes and its intricate undertones to a clash of cultures long eluded the stage. Last week in Oxford, the professional Oxford Playhouse proved that the job had at last been done, and successfully. The adapter, in her first try at drama: Santha Rama Rau, native of Madras, graduate of Massachusetts' Wellesley College, and a novelist herself. The play brought full organ tones from the London critics. Said the Express: "A great theatrical occasion."
Although Author Rau had to leave out much of the novel, she managed to extract the center while not damaging its heart. The play begins with an amplification of the Chandrapore tea party (Chapter 7 of the book), pitching together the bearers of Eastern and Western culture. The second act ably gets across the difficult scene in the Marabar Caves, where a young English miss neurotically imagines that she has been raped by Dr. Aziz, the thin-skinned Moslem. The action moves on to the British club and the shocked reaction of the other colonials, ends with the novel's trial scene (in the book, 13 more chapters follow). The confused girl withdraws her charge against Aziz, but at the final curtain the Indian angrily faces his former friend, an English school principal, across an unbridgeable distance: "We do not understand each other. We are on different sides, and until there is no question of sides, we cannot be friends."
At the Oxford premiere last week, one of the most dramatic moments occurred after the curtain fell. Ancient (81), legendary Edward Morgan Forster made his way to the bright side of the footlights. Speaking from the stage, he praised Santha Rama Rau's treatment ("excellent and sensitive"), thanked the 18-member cast "not only for being so good but for being so many. Most modern plays have only a man and two women or a woman and two men. I tried to depict the diversity of human types."