Theatre

It’s not often you get the chance to see a production that’s already entered the annals of theatrical history. Tim Supple’s ‘Dream’, which has been wrestling superlatives from audiences since it was first seen in this country at Stratford last year, is a very remarkable, not to mention highly unusual, achievement. A couple of dozen performers, drawn from all over India and Sri Lanka, trained in very different stage disciplines (from acrobatics to folk theatre), and speaking seven different languages, come together to breathe fresh, mysterious life into this most familiar of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Performing against a huge wooden climbing frame, initially wrapped, Christo-fashion, in white paper, the cast regularly find themselves airborne (hence the comparisons with Peter Brook’s famous 1970 trapeze-heavy white-box production). Lighting, design and music combine to brilliantly evocative effect to produce two and a half hours of enchantingly redemptive, sulphurously sexy spectacle: bolts of red fabric drop from the sky as the fairies go about their business and Archana Ramaswamy’s Titania is gathered up into a silky cocoon; Ajay Kumar’s darkly mischievous Puck weaves a physical web round the confused lovers in the Athenian forest…

There are obvious (and not insignificant) criticisms to be made. If you’ve never seen the play before, you’re unlikely to be able to grasp every detail of the story from the retelling here. The ‘rude mechanicals’ aren’t particularly funny (although Joy Fernandes is a wonderfully fleshy and affecting Bottom). And this is Shakespeare largely stripped of his language –  and what is Shakespeare but his verse? Few spectators will be able to understand all eight different languages spoken and the lines delivered in English are sometimes hard to make out thanks to the Roundhouse’s barn-like acoustics.

But this is still a wonderfully sensual production that captures the spirit of the play – and of the Indian subcontinent – magnificently. It also proves that Shakespeare has nothing to fear from globalisation.