Imagine being invited to India to develop a show exclusively with Indian and Sri Lankan actors but you are not given any direction as to what to do or how to do it. That is the challenging but artistically liberating proposition Director Tim Supple received from the British Council in India and Sri Lanka in the fall of 2004.

Supple, who has directed, adapted and devised theater, opera and film throughout the UK and around the world, and works regularly at The National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, had visited India in 1997 and felt an affinity with the mythology, traditional song and dance, and other aspects of Indian folk and classical theater.

“I had a sort of instinct that this would suit me,” he explains. “I have always been very interested in traveling and have worked with actors in Norway, German and Israel but this was potentially something closer to my heart.”

Supple promptly accepted the offer and began what would become a remarkable two-year creative journey throughout India culminating in his inspired re-imagining of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

He made his first trip in January of 2005 to visit Jaipaur, Delhi, Kolkatta, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. Supple attended performances in urban theatres, dusty courtyards and sweating jungles, experiencing the work of Indian performers of varied talents and backgrounds, trying to get a feel for what kind of show to mount.

“I was looking for a piece of work that would best express or contain the variety of performers that I was seeing throughout India in my travels,” Supple says.

He needed to find something to embrace the great differences in performance styles that he was witnessing and something that would be enhanced by the traditions of Indian theater and Indian society. At the end of three weeks, he had decided what to do but not how to do it.

“We chose to work on Shakespeare's Dream because we knew that modern India would illuminate and refresh the experience of this most famous play for audiences in India, the UK and across the world,” explains Supple. “Myth and urban reality; lovers' trials and workers’ struggles; the supernatural, the spiritual and the joyously earthbound; soaring beauty and filthy truth. All this is thrillingly alive in India and Indian theater today.”

Supple returned to India that spring to set up workshops and group auditions throughout the country. He experienced a staggering range of actors, musicians, choreographers, dancers and street acrobats — contemporary performers and those trained in classical and folk traditions. In 10 cities, over a period of a month, he short-listed down to 100, an incredible, eclectic mix — English-speaking highly educated actors to skilled traditional dancers to street kids whose families have passed down their craft from generation to generation over 2000 years. The interaction of these people from all over the country, of varying social and performance backgrounds and speaking different languages and dialects was the quintessence of the pluralistic, multiethnic culture that is India. Supple knew then that the production would be multifaceted and multilingual.

“It is an aspect of contemporary India,” says Supple. “I wanted to do the best production I could with the actors I had seen and in order to get them to be their strongest selves they had to speak the language they live with and act in. If I had done it all in English, I would have restricted myself to a very particular, limited group of people. None of the folk performers act in English, none of the traditional physical performers act in English.”

By the fall of 2005, after a year of traveling throughout India, Supple brought together a creative team and cast of 23 dancers, musicians, actors, street performers and acrobats of extraordinary skill and artistry. The result is a passionate, energetic and extremely physical re-interpretation of the play, one that supplants familiar traditions of how Shakespeare is performed with a raw, emotional power.

“The physicality within the cast is just who they are,” insists Supple. The Dream exists in an imaginative frame and you’ve got lovers tearing themselves to bits in the forest, fairies putting the fairy queen to sleep, four dances, mechanicals acting a play, it’s an absolutely physically expressed play.”

The production reflects certain aspects of Indian culture—multilingualism, social situations, superstitions, the nature of love and sex and eroticism and their inherent taboos. Many consider it to be the seminal production of Dream surpassing the 1970 critically acclaimed production with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As Michael Billington of the Guardian proclaimed, “in its strangeness, sexuality, and communal joy this is the most life-enhancing production of Shakespeare's play since Peter Brooks' 1970 interpretation.”

Charles Spencer of The Telegraph says “there is a constant feeling of Shakespeare being minted anew, of a company of superbly committed, versatile and highly individual performers getting straight to the heart of the play without having to plough through accreted layers of tradition. Everything seems fresh, spontaneous and positively throbbing with sensuality."

Tim Supple’s Indian Dream is intoxicating and visually spectacular, appealing to all the senses in its mad, torrid expression of falling in love. It reveals Shakespeare in a way people have not experienced before.

“Shakespeare can create a special event and, in the end, that was all we were trying to do,” explains Supple. “But something else was happening between this show and its audience—a celebration of the astonishing diversity of modern India and the vitality of its theater. We have much to learn from it.”

Back to SHNews