A Midsummer Night's Dream (review)

Thirty-six years ago, Peter Brook's RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream revolutionized a generation of theatre-making with its white-box minimalism influenced by circus techniques and intercultural performance traditions. Tim Supple's touring production of the same play, which was given twelve performances at the Swan Theatre as part of the RSC's year long Complete Works Festival, left many in its audience convinced that they had shared in a theatrical event of equivalent artistry and significance.

A former artistic director of the Young Vic, Supple is known for his commitment both to vivid, stripped-to-essentials storytelling and cross-cultural exploration. Previous productions include adaptations of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the RNT in 1999, and Midnight's Children for the RSC at the Barbican in 2003, both with predominantly Asian casts. His television version of Twelfth Night (Channel 4, 2003) also used a multicultural cast to explore themes of asylum and assimilation in contemporary Britain. The British Council broke with its established practice of bringing U.K. theatre to other cultures and instead commissioned Supple to devise an Indo-British co-production of the Dream cast entirely with Indian and Sri Lankan actors and using the performance traditions of contemporary South Asia, from Mumbai cinema to classical dance and folk theatre. Hundreds of workshops and auditions were held across the subcontinent, and the final company of actors between them spoke seven of India's seventeen official languages—English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, together with a smattering of Sanskrit —and brought skills ranging from martial arts to the traditional rope-tricks still staged by hereditary castes of street performers. What Supple terms the "realties of modern India—multilingualism, the range of traditional practice and . . . metropolitan practice" were melded into an exuberant affirmation of the Dream as a "sophisticated, highly intelligent folk play" (Interview, The Hindu Magazine, April 2, 2006), equally at home in specially-built outdoor theatres in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata, as in Stratford or Verona.

At the Swan, the first impression was of a pale, stone-clad, windowless palace, a floor swathed in moonlight-colored silk, and, downstage, what appeared to be a lingum (the phallus-like sculpture honoring Shiva found in most Hindu temples) set in a shallow tray of water. The entrance of Philostrate (Ajay Kumar, who also played Puck) as master of ceremonies revealed that this was in fact a "singing stone" —the product of German research and Indian construction—that produced haunting harmonics when caressed. Sound remained at the core of the play experience (Supple is also a successful director of opera). Unlike in Brook's monolingual Mahabharata, each character spoke his or her lines in the actor's own performance language (sometimes more than one), though it was the women who spoke the majority of lines in English. This was apparently in part because those actresses able and willing to explore a challenging physical style of performance also turned out to be fluent English-speakers, but the result was a powerful emphasis on the female characters' perspectives. Even in multilingual India very few of the audience would have understood every word, but, paradoxically, the effect of the polyglot dialogue was far from Babel-like. Rustom Bharucha has argued the need to acknowledge "the multi-tongued legacy of Shakespeare in the subcontinent itself . . . splintered...