I have no great love of adaptations, but I was intrigued to see what Shared Experience would make of EM Forster's 1924 classic. To my surprise, and pleasure, Nancy Meckler's production and Martin Sherman's text capture not just Forster's social realism but also something of his elusive symbolism.
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. Antony Bunsee captures very well the cryptic wisdom of Godbole. Susan Tracy pins down precisely Mrs Moore's shift from affable curiosity to despairing nihilism. Fenella Woolgar's Adela suggests a good woman, rather than a febrile hysteric, confronted by her own darkest sexual imaginings in the Marabar caves.
Alex Caan's impetuously friendly Dr Aziz and William Osborne's nervously kind Fielding evoke the physical intimacy and historical gulf that binds then separates the two characters. But then that duality lies at the heart of Forster's novel and is well caught in this sensitively intelligent production.
· Until September 25. Box office: 08700 500 511.
