A Passage to India, Riverside Studios, London

More metaphors for being human

The David Lean film version of EM Forster's A Passage to India was, in many respects, a sumptuous travesty. Alec Guinness was a great actor, but casting him as Godbole, the Hindu professor (a role for which he had to brown up) was not the most tactful touch for a piece that dramatises the racial insensitivities of the colonial British. The cultural solecisms were wince-making, as was the heavy-handed way the movie contentedly laboured emphases that were significantly different from those in the book. Lean simply ignored the homoerotic undercurrents in the relationship between Fielding, the liberal schools inspector, and Aziz, the Indian doctor who is falsely accused of rape. For Lean, the prime focus was Adela's painful release from repression, whereas in the book, the more telling and sadly diverted development is that of Fielding, who loses both a friend and the path of his true nature.

After such garbled gaudiness, Shared Experience's new stage adaptation, beautifully directed by Nancy Meckler, is refreshingly scrupulous and lucid. Except for the principals, the casting is colour-blind. With a simple whisk from turban to topee, the actors – who all wear the same basic white costume – transform themselves from the colonised to their sneering overlords. It's a bold way of evoking the Raj and adds its own sardonically subversive comment on the vicious dividedness of that society.

The staging is admirably uncluttered. A little fountain splashes at the centre of Nicki Turner's lovely design of scuffed, burnished copper. An elephant ride is suggested by the cast swaying together, a wobbly pyramid of people under a cream parasol, the trunk portrayed by a long flop of grey cloth. Martin Sherman's excellent adaptation gets to the heart of things with a comparable economy and incisiveness. It's a very shrewd move on his part to begin the proceedings with the ancient myth of the boy who freed the prisoners, was decapitated and worshipped as a saint in the two places where he was buried. It casts a revealing light on everything that follows. Sherman's version then flashes forward to the awkward meeting between Aziz (Paul Bazely) and Fielding (Ian Gelder) when the latter returns to India long after the scandal of the rape charge and trial has died away. This snatched sneak preview valuably hints at the central tragedy: the love between these men that will be destroyed.

Adela's crisis in the Marabar caves is presented as a disturbed erotic awakening that switches to terrified denial. The rocks (played by the actors) reach out and pull at her clothes. The production is very moving, but not at all sentimental. Susan Engel's superb Mrs Moore lapses into testy self-preoccupation after the incident, snapping at requests for sympathy as though the affairs of this world no longer had any claim on her. You're in no danger of mistaking this white-haired old lady for a latter-day saint.

When the cast came on to take their bows at the end identically dressed in loose white clothing, I was reminded of something Peter Brook once said to me during an interview – that being an Englishman or Chinaman or whatever is merely one of the metaphors for being human.

To 22 February (020-8237 1111)