Theatre - Sheridan Morley on two very different journeys into the history of the subcontinent

In the history of British writing about India, no story has been more hauntingly adapted than E M Forster's A Passage to India. There was a stage version in the 1950s, as well as David Lean's 1984 movie. What is fascinating about Martin Sherman's new stage adaptation for Shared Experience is that it tries, for the very first time, to see the story through Indian rather than colonial eyes. Forster published the original novel in 1924, just when the whole British approach to the Indian subcontinent was thrown into disarray by local rioting and a sudden, post-First World War doubt about our right to be colonial masters.

Sherman has seen, in a slender novel, that Forster was writing about the national identity and political and religious awareness of India when these had suddenly become an issue. The key event of the story happens off-stage - precisely what happened in the unseen Marabar Caves to the English debutante Adela Quested is never resolved, not even after an almost hour-long court scene. Moreover, Mrs Moore, the nearest we get to a colonial woman of decency, dies suddenly, mysteriously, off stage.

Although these central plot issues remain essentially as unresolved as they are on the page, the director Nancy Meckler, borrowing a trick or two from Theatre de Complicite, has her agile 11-member cast form themselves into elephants and entire railway trains. But it remains Sherman's evening, simply because he has had the courage to leave Forster's questions unanswered. All previous attempts on stage and screen to tidy up the narrative have proved either unnecessary or irrelevant. What Sherman's version says is that these issues of love and hate, God and man, and above all human rights in a colonial situation, need to be left as Forster leaves them - with no ready-made solutions. And in a strong and versatile company, Susan Engel as Mrs Moore, Ian Gelder as Fielding, the British school principal with principles, and Paul Bazely as the complex Dr Aziz are outstanding.

Perhaps this is not a good time to admit that I've never managed to get through Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's Booker of Bookers-winning novel. And maybe the week of A Passage to India is not the best time to see another panoply of Indian history. But those are the breaks.

What we have here, dramatised by the RSC at the Barbican, is a cartoon with very heavy credentials - dramatisation by Rushdie himself, Simon Reade and the director Tim Supple; lots of film projections (both documentary and specially shot); a huge cast of Indian actors; and the entire show - for show it is, with songs, dances, hallucinations and the like - takes three and a half hours.

The title refers to the children of the subcontinent who were born at midnight on 15 August 1947, at the moment when India shed her colonial past and became the world's largest democracy, self-governing, fiercely contentious, religiously divided. This is nothing less than a history of that great country through the lives of one boy, one family.

It consists of dozens of short scenes, dizzying in number but ultimately disappointing in their content. If you concentrate hard you can discern a connection between them, but you are never allowed to spend enough time with any of them to care what happens to them. What made Rushdie's novel remarkable was the flow of its language, the sweep of its ambition. When chopped up into short soundbites it loses its majesty but retains its pretensions.

Where the first half is too simple, lacking in subtlety, the second half is incomprehensible. About two hours in, I lost the will to live but there was another hour and a half to go. I got hopelessly lost, without hope of re-engaging in the sea of unfamiliar names, the uninteresting and unexplained political issues, and the stock Indian characters all too identifiable from a succession of soap operas.

A Passage to India is at the Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111) until 22 February

Midnight's Children is at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891) until 23 February

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