A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Her Majesty's Theatre Adelaide, then Sydney Theatre March 11 - 22, 2008.
Unless you’ve been asleep and in a dream of your own you will have read or seen something about Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is the one where the English director went to India at the instigation of the British Council on a mission of cultural diplomacy and artistic exploration. After months of auditioning and travel he ended up with a polyglot cast to do Shakespeare’s much-loved nonsense of mischievous fairies, well-meaning peasants and silly young lovers in eight languages – including the original English.
It's a wondrous experience. Even when you know that Shakespeare is about to come at you in a mix of Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Sinhala, Marathi and Kannada it’s startling. Startling because, after a couple of minutes, it’s no longer apparent that you don’t understand what’s being said. The poetry, acting and visual clues are so strong that when an actor occasionally breaks into English ("The course of true love ...") it seems neither different nor particularly noteworthy. The magic has worked: we are all speaking and hearing in tongues! Or something.
Peter Brook’s fabled Dream was the last version of this play to break the mould of how it is done and how it is remembered. Tim Supple has managed something similar but, where Brook’s Dream was famously white and ethereal, this one is texturally, visually, thematically all colour and of the earth. And not just any earth or colour, but the earths and hues we associate with India: ochre, white clay, charcoal, henna, saffron, cochineal, turmeric, umber, cerise, gold, lapis, coral, turquoise, emerald, ruby, you get the picture.
Then there are the physical colours and textures of the multi-ethnic cast: burnished skin in all tones of brown and amber and swirling heads of thick, lustrous, curly, wavy, unruly, satiny, sweeping black, black hair. Never have we seen hair featured in such sensuous and dazzling abundance – and that’s just the men.
The fairy king and queen and young nobles are clad in shot silks of edible deliciousness; the rude mechanicals plod through life in the rough-textured garb of peasants or the polite white shirt of the minor clerk. Their world is a a rich earth stage backed by an oversize Bollywood movie screen of bamboo scaffolding and white paper. The performers appear through it, on it and clamber and perch upon it. There are various circus ropes and silken hangings for acrobatics (and the most beautiful and imaginative suspended bower for Titania’s snooze since Deborah Mailman’s waratah bed of 1997). On either side of the stage sit the musicians whose instruments include Indian drums, western percussion and guitar and all kinds of sound effects.
Ajay Kumar is a punkish Puck with plaited leather thong-wrapped arms, a Mohican-do and intricate facial hair. His master Oberon (P R Jijoy) is handsomely noble and a proper match for an amazonian warrior queen Titania ((Archana Ramaswamy). The games of enchantment played by Puck and Oberon at the expense of Titania and poor lumbering, foolish Bottom (Joy Fernandes) are seen in an unusually sharp relief – literally – you can imagine them all leaping to life from an erotic temple carving, particularly when the enchanted Bottom wakes up with accoutrements of which any silly ass would be proud.
All in all, this much anticipated Dream lives up to hype and expectation and is a joy and thrill to watch. What a great and amazing idea; and how boldly and brilliantly realised.
