"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
directed by Tim Supple
sponsored by the British Council
If in 2006 Vishal Bharadwaj transported "Othello" into the brown badlands of Uttar Pradesh with his film Omkara, British director Tim Supple's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" could easily have been set in some mythical forest in the Vindhyas. Why, it could even have been an untold canto from the Aranyakanda of Ramayana, with Shakespeare's fairies as lively vanaras, and Puck a young, playful Hanuman himself. In the true spirit of free creatures of the forest, Supple's creatures indulge in acrobatic feats, climb up ladders and shimmy down ropes, roll in the mud and jump in the air.
The opening scene of the play – which premiered in India during 2006 and is now again on tour in the Subcontinent, sponsored by the British Council – does not prepare viewers for what is to come. It is formal, even solemn, as Philostrate, sidekick to the duke of Athens (and who is later Puck) walks onto the stage, with the sound of traditional Hindostani instrumentation in the background. As he runs his hand through the water at the front of the stage, the spotlights reflect the surface's shimmer onto the roof. Embodied in this is, evidently, the first instruction that Supple wants to send to his audience: to look, not listen. This is followed by the well-known scene in the court, in which Theseus, the duke of Athens, orders Hermia and Demetrius to get married, in accordance with her father's wishes. Actually, Hermia has two other choices as well – death, or life as a nun. But then this famous scene changes, as in the middle of his monologue Theseus suddenly breaks into Sinhala. At this point, those in the audience are forced to scramble frantically for the familiar. This reviewer chose to replay the memory of the reflected sparkle of water on the theatre's ceiling, while coming to terms with an unfamiliar language.
Just then, a bunch of fairies burst into the scene, literally tearing apart Sumant Jayakrishnan's paper-covered bamboo set, and making their ways through the holes – bending, jumping and dancing. With that, a tone of frenzied movement is set, a tone that turns out to play a crucial role in this vehemently multilingual production. This is a play in which the characters speak in seven different languages – Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Sinhala and English. Or, it could have been eight, taking into account the bits of Sanskrit on which other reviewers have claimed to pick up.