Andrew Haydon
posted 20 March 2007

Hitting London amidst of one of the biggest critical fanfares of recent times, Tim Supple's multilingual Indian production of A Midsummer Night's Dream turns out to be in need of some serious de-bunking. Garlanded in superlatives and spoken of in comparison with Peter Brook's seminal 1970 white-room production, it promises to be utterly spectacular. With an eye to posterity, the action opens before a vast white paper wall, replete with a hanging platform, looking suspiciously similar to photos of the legendary Brook production; three acts in, fairies suddenly rip their way through the paper and set about gradually tearing the white backdrop from its scaffolding. It is a nice touch, but do they earn the right to this sort of iconoclasm? .

This genesis of this production came when Supple was commissioned to go to India to create a version of Shakespeare's play. India currently has 22 official languages including English, and the text is here performed in seven of them, with the original early modern script making up maybe just under fifty percent of what is spoken on stage.

Oddly, it is often easier to tell what's going on when the actors aren't speaking in English. The accompanying gesture and extraordinarily clear actions deployed to aid audiences in their understanding of the other languages is markedly more effective than the acting of the original text. The fact is that a lot of the company's voice work simply isn't up to the job. There are exceptions; Shanaya Rafaat's Helena is passionate, wild and playful, while Joy Fernandes' Bottom is suitably comic as a human and strangely compelling as a donkey. But in the main, the speech which is potentially comprehensible by an English audience is muddied by poor projection and verse-speaking. Archana Ramaswamy's Titania (and Hippolyta) already seems perilously close to losing her voice.

In spite of all this, Shakespeare's odd, tri-partite tale of mischievous fairies, mismatched lovers and misguided Am-Dram comes across clearly enough; what is strange, having lost the most of the poetry and jokes, is that it becomes a matter of simply watching emotional beings reacting to one another. At its best this works well and gives a sense of rediscovering the play afresh. The relationships between the pairs of lovers, stripped of the reams of verbiage, are pared down into near-savage physical negotiations. When Lysander, enchanted, pursues Helena in the forest, his ardour is closer to rape than rapture. Similarly, Bottom's transformation into a donkey, complete with a butternut squash swinging lewdly from his groin as a donkey phallus, is more animalistic than the usual mild addition of long ears, and the scenes in which Titania is enamoured leave the audience in little doubt as to with what it is that she is enamoured; while Bottom lets out some fearsome donkey-like brays in between his few remarks to attendant fairies. But, equally often scenes come across as rather staid readings of the action, with inaudible, or incomprehensible dialogue.

What really works here, and is frequently spectacular, is the extraneous material; aerialists dangle, traditional dances and songs burst forth, and there is some hilarious business with huge quantities of elastic thread. Numerous critics in the national press have claimed that this production makes an iron-clad case for Shakespeare's universality. In fact it does quite the reverse; if all the most successful elements of the show are wholly extrinsic and more than half the play is missing - in what way is Shakespeare's universality being asserted? The production makes a far better case for the universality of acrobatics, song and spectacle than early modern wordplay and thin plotting. This is a patchy bit of work; the best moments are indeed impressive, but much of the acting is below par. Tim Supple has created something interesting here, but in his enthusiasm, seems to have lost sight of the play.

Till 11 April 2007