A curiously apt Oberon and Titania silently oversee proceedings at the
Adishakti ashram in Auroville. In what Shakespeare calls the “spiced Indian
air” of deepest Tamil Nadu, rerehearsals for Tim Supple’s multilingual A
Mid-summerNight’sDream are in full swing. Half the cast dangle above the
stage on ropes or perch precariously on a bamboo scaffold that forms the
skeleton of the set.
The earthbound contingent of the 23-strong cast, brought together from the
four corners of the sub-continent, are working on Act III. The rude
mechanicals avidly rehearse their production of Pyra-mus and Thisbe, when
Puck transforms their finest actor into an ass. “Bless thee, Bottom,” cries
Peter Quince, “thou art translated.” Indeed he is — in this instance, into
Hindi — but the meaning of the line couldn’t be clearer, with a quivering
Quince paying considerably less attention to Bottom’s new donkey’s ears than
to the giant protuberance, in the form of a large aubergine, that dangles
louchely between his legs.
In all, Supple’s production uses seven languages, with roughly half the play
performed in English. Oberon wields power in Malayalam, Puck wreaks havoc in
Hindi (and a fetching pair of underpants) and Lysander and Demetrius chase
tails through the forests in Bengali and Sinhalese.
As the cast do some particularly hair-raising warm-up exercises, an ashram
worker refills the oil lamps illuminating the two outsized sacred portraits
that bless the rehearsal space. Images of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are
omnipresent in Auroville, a spiritual city of nearly 2,000 inhabitants,
inaugurated in 1968. Together, the French devotee and her Indian guru
represent a mystic union of East and West, traditional spirituality and
futuristic practicality — precisely the kind of harmonious, progressive
coupling Supple has sought to create with his production, which arrives in
London on Thursday.
The response to its English premiere at the Swan, in Stratford-upon-Avon, last
June, where it ran briefly as part of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival,
promises a rapturous reception for the rerun.
One critic described it as a “sensation”, the most life-enhancing production
of the play since Peter Brook’s in 1970; another predicted that it would be
talked about for decades, calling for its return to Britain as a matter of
urgency.
The project was the brain-child of the British Council offices in India and
Sri Lanka. Supple recalls: “Some people were worried about the
multi-lingualism, about my cherry-picking bits of India, about whether it
was too radical, or not radical enough, with the text. Generally, it felt as
if there was a lot riding on it.” A pan-Indian, multilingual production had
not been attempted on this scale before. There was also resistance to the
imperialistic overtones of uniting India through Shakespeare. During the
Raj, the Bard was a staple of the Indian education system, primarily as a
language-teaching tool. The first recorded staging of his work (probably of
Othello) occurred in Mumbai in 1770, with English actors performing for a
purely colonial audience. But India quickly adopted Shakespeare for her own
ends. As early as 1852, a Gujarati version of The Taming of the Shrew was
performed. Its title alluringly translates as “How a bad Firangee
[European] woman was brought to her senses”.
Shakespeare’s popularity dipped considerably during the Free India movement,
however, and in the postindependence period of the 1950s and 1960s. Supple
was sensitive to the issue, but not unduly concerned: “It quickly became
clear that I wasn’t interested in having Indian actors ape British versions
of Shakespeare, which would perhaps be a colonial idea. Neither did I want
performers to come on and do their shtick, fire-eating or whatever, which
would make a pretty boring piece of cultural exotica. I wanted to create a
good, honest piece of real theatre. That’s an awful lot to achieve.”
On opening night in Delhi, in May 2006, the audience gave the production a
standing ovation. In Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata, the response was, if
anything, increasingly effusive. “I knew it would go even better in the UK,”
says Supple, “freed of all those cultural concerns. For a British audience,
there are essentially two languages on stage: English and not.” If he could
convey the Dream’s meaning to audiences all over India, none of whom would
be able to follow all seven languages on stage, he knew it would be possible
to do so in Stratford-upon-Avon.
“A Shakespeare production should seek to reflect the time and place in which
it is made with vivid honesty,” Supple said at the time. Today, he concludes
that if his Dream succeeded, it is because he was able to stay true to that
intention. The impeccably detailed mechanicals effortlessly evoke images of
India’s street traders. The issue of a man wanting to marry his daughter
where her heart has no desire to go still lives and breathes in contemporary
India, as does the accepted presence of a potent spirit world. From the folk
dances that rub shoulders with ancient martial arts and classical dance
steps to the blinding colours of Sumant Jayakrishnan’s elemental set, this
is a production steeped in the infinite variety of its Indian context.
The performers were cast after an intensive, month-long audition process that
took Supple “from the slums of Delhi to the jungles outside Kolkota”. All
agree that Supple required them to work way beyond their normal performance
range. For PR Jijoy, the Keralan mime and martial-arts expert who plays
Oberon and Theseus, the journey was primarily about the text. “At times, I
felt like the rude mechanicals,” he says bashfully. For Joy Fer-nandes, an
English-literature graduate who plays a poised and deeply serious Bottom, it
concerned movement. “I was a straight actor,” he says, “so it was a
challenge for me to find the physical dimension Tim needed. We’ve all had to
learn new skills. Nobody knew ropework before we started, but now, watching
the fairies whirling in the air, you would think they’d done it all their
lives.”
A keynote of the production is its raw, explosive sensuality, one element that
is far from visible in contemporary India. Interestingly, all four women in
the cast hail from the bustling megatropolis of Mumbai, and A Midsummer
Night’s Dream opens at the Roundhouse, NW1, on Thursday none of
them expressed reservations about their performance: “You know, we wrote the
Kama Sutra,” says Archana Ramaswamy, a classically trained dancer, who plays
Titania and Hippolyta. “And in our temples, you see half-naked statues
everywhere.” True, but in the temple nearest to Adishakti, all are modestly
draped in saris.
Supple retorts definitively: “You could find that tension between eroticism
and moral restraint in every culture you set the play in. It’s just that
these actors express it better.” When asked why that might be, he shrugs:
“Convention, ego, the way the profession is set up, strict working hours —
it’s hard to put a finger on, but the way I work here is the way I want to
work with actors from now on.” He concedes that directing in India has its
challenges. “Text, characterisation, realism: those things aren’t there in
the same way. But there’s a wealth of skill and artistry, coupled with this
bursting, vibrant ability to connect that is so hard to find in the West. I
discovered I’m much happier working this way around.” The 44-year-old former
artistic director of the Young Vic has international theatre projects on his
horizons that will take him from North Africa to Arabia, China, South
America, Israel and Palestine. In each case, he will seek to reflect the
culture he finds himself in with vibrant honesty.
In his Indian Dream, with its prodigious, heady admixture of tradition and
experimentation, East and West, the soaringly airborne and the determinedly
earthbound, Supple has done just that. But India, as Fernandes so
presciently puts it, will always evade any attempt to define it. “What is
India? Does anybody know? Anyone who says India is this or India is that is
talking a lot of balderdash. Nobody, but nobody, knows India.” All we can
do, he concludes genially, with the help of Shakespeare, Supple and “this
wondrous motley cast”, is dream it for a while.
