Theatre
This is such stuff as dreams are made on
Published 26 March 2007
A multilingual, multicultural take on Shakespeare's play is a joy
A Midsummer Night's Dream Roundhouse, London NW1
A man pours water over a stone sculpture. A woman appears wearing a dress of pleated gold. The stage is covered with silk, the back wall with sheets of pure white. Indian music floats through the air. The grim brick drum that is north London's Roundhouse has been utterly transformed for Tim Supple's visually ravishing Indian/Sri Lankan Midsummer Night's Dream.
Supple devised this Dream in India, where it was first performed last year with a polyglot script of English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and a pinch of Sanskrit. For a play that depends on the interweaving of four separate worlds - court, lovers, fairies and mechanicals - using different languages is a smart idea. Supple has kept in enough English for those who don't know the play, and the plot is given in the programme. And while I hankered for "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows", Supple's decision to lose that and other famous (or clichéd) passages allowed some original drama to flower. Yet for those who are solely anglophone, there was no obvious pattern to the choice of language employed.
After a while, I stopped trying to find an explanation for what language was used when, and went with the experience.
The show looks amazing, and gets better the more it delves into the supernatural. The arrival of Titania's fairies is a real coup de théâtre, as they come bursting through the taut paper that covers the back wall of Sumant Jayakrishnan's giant set to reveal a bamboo structure on which the fairies then sit, swing and climb. Titania (Archana Ramaswamy), doubling as Hippolyta, has astoundingly long hair and equally astounding sex appeal, coupled with queenly command. She never leaves you in any doubt that she thinks she is in charge of the situation, even while legging it up 30 feet of red cloth, into which she delightfully binds herself for her fateful nap. Equally, Puck (Ajay Kumar) brings an earthy physicality and middle-aged mischief to the role; slightly paunchy, with sideburns, he crushes his love potion in a beefy fist before smearing it over the eyes of his victims, who writhe in torment, not desire, as he does so.
This is a Dream in which the sting of misplaced love is painful rather than lyrical. Once the Athenian lovers are out in the woods, the silk carpet of the court is whipped away to expose a dirty floor of packed earth on which they wrangle. Ripped clothes replace lavish garb. It is a dangerous, unsteady place to be. Supple underplays the famous cat-fight between the two maids, Helena and Hermia, replacing it with a heightened sense of sexual menace - indeed, even fury - between the men and the women. At one point, Demetrius appears to be trying to rape Hermia. A notion of mortal terror in the wood is stressed by the quartet being tormented by fairies who are hardly pixies with wings, more grown men with sticks. In one wonderful sequence, Puck winds all four into a web of tightly bound cords, over which they helplessly trip and fall.
Meanwhile, the comedy rattles along, courtesy of the mechanicals: a bunch of working-class Indians who are no less polite and charming than the nobles at court. Bottom (Joy Fernandes), an eye-rolling mountain of a man, is transformed into an ass by virtue of a pair of straw ears and a giant gourd, which he wears as an immense, dangling phallus. In one scene, Fernandes gambols around the stage being led by the fairies, who have tied a string to his gourd. He grunts and brays with such visceral pleasure that Titania's erotic overtures to him seem almost quite understandable.
The only problem with the production is the bewitched acoustics of the Roundhouse itself, which render whole chunks of dialogue completely inaudible. The performers do the best they can, but a shouted Midsummer Night's Dream is no dream at all, and it makes the acting seem somewhat forced, whereas it should be as flexible as the appropriately named director presumably intended it to be.
For further information visit www.roundhouse.org.uk
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Japanese-influenced puppet-show version of Shakespeare's text.
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