Bridge Party

A Passage to India attempts to translate into three acts the astringencies of E. M. Forster's renowned novel. Santha Rama Rau has done her adaptation with intelligence, and the acting--notably that of Eric Portman--is excellent. But the play is not entirely successful. The reduction in scale is true to the shape of the novel, but less broad, less deep.

In Chandrapore, Forster's provincial Indian town of the 1920s, the British raj condescendingly called social events attended by both races ''bridge parties." The play opens with such a party. Fielding (Portman), the government college principal and a man too decent to play raj, has invited a mixed bag to tea. Among his guests are a pair of British ladies--who want to see India. One of them, lanky, pink, ditherish Miss Quested (Anne Meacham), who has come from England to be married; and Mrs. Moore (Gladys Cooper), the mother of Miss Quested's fiance. They meet Dr. Aziz (expertly played by Zia Mohyeddin), a Moslem who is young, charming, overemotional, awkward and desperately anxious to please. His position, India's and Britain's are dryly summed up by two incidents. Before the ladies come, Fielding cannot find his back collar stud, and the puppyish Aziz plucks out his own and forces the principal to take it. Later Miss Quested's fiance, by his own admission a "sundried bureaucrat," uses Aziz to illustrate the hopeless flaw in the Indian character: the man is neatly dressed, he points out, except for a comical inattention to detail--he has forgotten his back collar stud.

The ladies have not yet learned the Anglo-Indian's snobbery, and they accept Dr. Aziz's impulsive invitation to visit some local caves. Here the effort of compression undoes the adapter. In the novel, the reader is made to understand that each woman is already under a severe strain. Old Mrs. Moore's is the approach of death and the retreat of God; Miss Quested's is an incomprehension of love. When the heat, the smells, and the frightening echoes turn Mrs. Moore abruptly into a benumbed old sibyl and induce Miss Quested to believe that Dr. Aziz has attacked her, the viewer suspects that something, perhaps the play, has been going on behind his back.

The trial of Dr. Aziz is done caustically, and here the audience is somewhat better prepared for Miss Quested's sudden shift--this time to relative sanity. The final scene is a superb measuring of tensions between two men, but it is oddly disappointing. Fielding and Aziz, who has been cleared, come to see that the injustices of other men--of victor and victims--have doomed their friendship. They part in sadness, and the play trails off (as the novel does not) in the unsubstantiated hope that tomorrow will be better.

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