Gary Pillai in A Passage To India

  Reviews

"The triumph of Nancy Meckler's beautifully imagined Shared Experience production, in Martin Sherman's cleverly distilled adaptation, is that it does more than dramatise Forsters narrative about colonialism and crisis of east-west relations. Meckler conveys Forster's essence." Evening Standard

"On the material level, the familiar story of Adela Quested's hunger to see the "real India", of the ill-fated excursion with Mrs Moore to the Marabar Caves and of Adela's aborted accusations against Dr Aziz is lucidly told. There is also, thankfully, not too much of that self-conscious physical virtuosity which companies sometimes bring to literary work. When the actors huddle together to evoke an elephant or judder and shake to simulate a moving train, they do it with tact rather than as if expecting us to be bowled over by their skill.

"But the real success of this version lies in conveying Forster's subterranean symbolism: his acknowledgement of division and hunger for completeness. Sherman does this partly by turning the Hindu mystic, Professor Godbole, into a linking narrator who starts with the mythic story of a boy-saint whose decapitated head and body were separately worshipped. But Sherman also treats the relationship between the Muslim Dr Aziz and the schools inspector Fielding as the vital key to the book; at first bound together in homoerotic friendship, they are divided by the doctor's trial, with only British expulsion from India offering any hope of spiritual accord.

"Even if it is impossible to embrace all Forster's verbal nuances, this production conveys his strange double-vision. And in Meckler's production, re-cast since its first appearance, the 11 actors switch easily between the colonisers and the colonised. ****" Michael Billington, The Guardian