An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 9th Feb 18
A Passage to India is an adaptation of E M Forster’s novel co-produced by Simple8 and Royal & Derngate, Northampton, adapted by Simon Dormandy, who co-directed the production with Sebastian Armesto. The production is on a 6-stop national tour, having just played the Northampton’s R&D, the Salisbury Playhouse and the Bristol Old Vic. It’s playing at the Liverpool Playhouse till the end of the week (10 Feb). If you want to catch it, and I recommend you do, it’s going on to play Bromley’s Churchill Theatre (13-17 Feb) and a long run at London’s Park Theatre (20 Feb-24 Mar).
The Liverpool Playhouse is joint-owned by the Everyman and is only a short walk from either the Central or Lime Street railway stations. The Playhouse certainly isn’t modern in comparison to its sister-theatre, the Everyman, but neither is it shabby – it has old-fashioned charm, a spacious first-floor bar with a view over Williamson Square and elegant décor in its delightfully traditional proscenium arch auditorium. There were few empty seats in the stalls and the auditorium buzzed with excited chatter, which is always heart-warming in a time of much pessimism with the lack of engagement in theatre.
This is the best professional production I’ve seen in a long time. Simple8 have assembled a truly stunning cast – and star-studded too. Just a glance at the programme shows that the cast have trained at RADA, LAMDA, Bristol, and most have at least a full column of theatre and film credits, and it shows. The acting throughout is precise and believable, and the cast’s utter conviction help sustain our suspension of disbelief in the more interpretive non-naturalistic moments.
The cast are unamplified which has led to a general declamatory raised voice in the dialogue. This doesn’t detract from the immersion, in fact it chimes with the stilted, awkward speech of that era, and the reminder of theatrical performance is a nice reminder that these characters are often performing a front to others. The dialogue is witty, and funny in the way that the funny of a century ago is funny for no longer being funny, and at times got a good chuckle from the audience.
It’s very much an ensemble performance, which utilises a large cast well to evoke the large dramatis personae of the source novel and the populous and varied India which is its subject matter, but there were a few stand-out stars of the show. Asif Khan, who played Aziz, was the obvious star, carrying a constant internal energy seemingly only constrained by his historical circumstances. Liz Crowther was an admirable and noble Mrs. Moore to whom one couldn’t help feeling a swell of fellow feeling. To end a far from exhaustive sample of the show’s talent, Richard Goulding played superbly the ‘extraordinary moral courage’ which Dormandy sees in Fielding. The play’s most startlingly powerful relationship is that of Aziz and Fielding, a stern repudiation of Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’ and a corrective riposte to the white saviour paradigm of To Kill a Mockingbird, with humanist empathy with the colonialised other which one doesn’t expect from literature of the time of Forster’s writing.
The actors often break from in-character conversation to speak directly to the audience in Forster’s voice. And that’s what makes Dormandy’s adaptation so fantastic: it isn’t so much a staging of the literal beat-by-beat of Forster’s plot but a translation of Forster’s novelinto theatrical form, with plenty of moments of innovative deconstruction.
The most obvious ‘deconstruction’ is the entire lack of realistic set, with a fabric sheet at the back of the playing space being the only set other than nondescript white boxes which serve a variety of functions (as chairs, an elephant, etc.). There is also no tabbing to hide the cross-lighting or the exits to the wings. Dormandy says in his dramaturgical notes in the programme that the reason for the minimalist design is to ‘focus on character and relationships’ and this foregrounding is achieved to impressive effect.
The cast spend most of the time on stage, even when not in scenes, spending minimal time changing to stand or sit at the verge of the playing space looking in, turning the playing space into a kind of thrust staging with characters making up the other two sides of the audience. This is an excellent way to highlight who wasn’tin the scene, particularly in scenes composed entirely of members of one community or the other, highlighting, for example, the casual racism of the anglo-Indians and the tensions which, to begin with, don’t quite rise to the surface in the presence of the other community. The constant tensiom of race/community relations is a testament to the precision of directing and acting in the show.
Certain other perks of the minimalist staging include the necessity for innovation in evoking effect, themes or locations beyond the scope of a single body and voice – for example, the choral physical work to confine Mrs Moore, Aziz and Adela in the Marabar Caves gave Forster’s elemental villain a malevolent human presence which simple set could not. Choral voice work was also used for an existentially uncanny deconstruction of the Marabar Caves’ infamous echo – Dormandy wanted to recreate Forster’s ‘philosophically challenging’ writing which confronts us with ‘the mystery and dread of what may lie beyond the neat, rational systems of belief with which we seek to make sense of our experience’, and the experience is suitably unsettling.
What let the production down unfortunately was roughly the last quarter of the play, as the zipping through years of Aziz’ and Fielding’s lives made the action chronologically disjointed and created a distance with the characters which made it harder to empathise with them. This is more a difficulty of translating such a grand work as Forster’s novel into drama, but the last half-hour-or-so felt more like a speedy checklist of ‘things that happen at the end’ than involving and considered theatre.
Overall, and with some regret, I’m giving A Passage to India a 4/5 – if it were possible, I could give the innovative, engrossing, soulful first three-quarters of the production a 5/5, but the sour taste of a wishy-washy ending was all the more disappointing after such a fantastic production.
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