A little too fleeting for its own good - A Passage to India, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, review
The finest stage adaptation of a literary work I’ve ever seen wasn’t, in effect, an “adaptation”; it was almost an admission of defeat translated into a triumphant act of theatrical bravura. Gatz, by New York company Elevator Repair Service, faithfully gave audiences the entirety of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in a performance lasting eight hours. It was “word for word”, yet far from a glorified audio-book. By a process of imaginative alchemy, a modern office-worker’s gradual immersion in the novel through the act of reading – with those around him playfully and imperceptibly stepping into roles – transported you to Long Island.
I’m not suggesting that the experimental idea should be lifted wholesale, but one of the frustrations of this not quite pukka touring version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India (published a year earlier than Gatsby, in 1924) is its brevity. Within the space of an hour, we’ve arrived in the (fictional) city of Chandrapore, situated by the Ganges, been introduced to roughly a dozen characters, and headed to the mysterious Marabar caves – where the echo of every sound forms a sinister-monotonous “ ‘bou-oum’ or ‘ou-boum’ ” – and something unpleasant seizes the “queer, cautious” Adela Quested in the darkness, resulting in the arbitrary arrest and trial of a Muslim physician called Dr Aziz for sexual assault.
Never mind the giddiness that afflicts this wilting creature – who has pined to see “the real India” while she assesses the marital eligibility of the city magistrate, Ronny – I felt a degree of motion sickness myself: here a snatch of dialogue, there a snippet of Forster’s beady-eyed and nuanced narration. As if clearing a path through the jungle, swathes of scene-setting description have been hacked way by the adaptor (and, with Sebastian Armesto, co-director) Simon Dormandy. There’s little time to sketch the peculiarity and perniciousness of the imperial project – the bridge games, the playing of the national anthem, the racist barbs (“They oughtn’t to be spoken to, they ought to be spat at”).
Dormandy is known for having nurtured a gilded generation of male actors while head of drama at Eton for 15 years; fascinatingly, first time round this adaptation ‘starred’ a very young Eddie Redmayne, cross-dressing as Adela in a padded bra – with Tom Hiddleston also in the cast.
The obvious gain of this professional staging is that we get a diverse cast, bringing home the piece’s keenly felt message today of different cultures colliding and, thanks to brave individual endeavours, almost connecting. Whether it yet feels like a fully coherent ensemble is another matter.
Dormandy wants our imaginations to do much of the work, so has kept scenery and colour to a minimum. At times, as when matches flare and flicker in the darkness, with bamboo sticks held at threatening, alarming angles to evoke the claustrophobia of the caves, the cast chanting in ominous unison, the effect is potent; quite often though it feels as though we’re spinning too fast between the worlds of period-drama naturalism and heightened, physical stylisation.
Granted, I’m grumbling. The succinct gist of the story is here, the accompanying Indian music from Kuljit Bhamra is an atmospheric pleasure and there are some strong central performances: from Asif Khan as the dignified but finally damaged and mistrustful Aziz, Richard Goulding as Fielding, the college head whose intense, boundary-crossing friendship with him is scuppered by the debacle, and Liz Crowther as the otherworldly Mrs Moore. More’s the word though. I’d happily have endured a much slower passage through Forster’s time-honoured classic.
In Northampton until Sat (tickets: 01604 6248110), then touring until March 24. Tour details: simple8.co.uk
