The director Tim Supple left England for India and Sri Lanka in 2005, not knowing what a modest British Council grant would bring. He returned with a production of “The Dream” that must count among the most original since Peter Brook tackled the play in 1970. Apart from the spectacle and the fun, both of which are considerable, how many revivals come with actors speaking Shakespeare in no fewer than eight languages, Hindi to Tamil, Bengali to ancient Sanskrit to that great unifier of the Raj, English itself?

Even those unfamiliar with the play shouldn’t be confused. Most of the funnier and more significant lines are the Bard’s own and, when the actors move into their own languages, the excited body language makes the meaning clear. At the start you can’t miss that Egeus is that familiar figure, the heavy father who has arranged an unwanted marriage for his daughter, in this case Yuki Ellias’s Hermia, and shoves and hurls her about as he asserts a paternal dominance that even the local duke, or rajah, P. R. Jijoy’s Theseus, feels that he can’t resist.

This is a physically bold production, at times more so than Brook’s. There, one never felt that Lysander and Demetrius might commit rape in the Athenian forest. Here, each strips off with very much that intent if not that execution. But the circus gadgetry is in the Brook tradition: a paper back wall through which characters crash, reducing it to symbolic tatters; a vast bamboo climbing frame on which they cavort; big red sashes up which they clamber.

There’s plenty more imaginative trickery. Ajay Kumar’s Puck, grinning and prancing and exuding a glee at upsetting human beings that for once justifies Oberon’s accusations of malice, does things with tape that leaves the befogged lovers feeling they’re not merely trapped in a forest but hopping about in a giant game of cat’s cradle. But there are also questions that eluded my universally ecstatic colleagues when they caught the play in Stratford last year.

As often, Oberon and Titania are performed by the same actors who play their human counterparts and, as often, the inference is that the play itself is one of those dreams that allow troubled people to sort out their conflicts. But, if so, shouldn’t Archana Ramaswamy’s Hippolyta make her angry, flouncing protest at Theseus’s treatment of Hermia more clearly? She’s not sufficiently the alienated Amazon queen, although she compensates with a sort of snappish sexuality when she and Jijoy’s Theseus become their fairy selves.

Actually, there is a lot of sensuality in this touring revival, not least when Ramaswamy’s Titania falls for Joy Fernandes’s Bottom: a big, booming soul exuding good nature as well as embarrassment at the aubergine-like phallus that provides low accompaniment to his ass-ears. His fellow mechanicals, impoverished blokes who might be seen in any Calcutta street market, are shaken. So are we, but with laughter.

Box office: 0870 3891846, to April 14, then on tour until November

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