IN CONVERSATION
`I love theatre that has energy'
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
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Tim Supple, whose unique theatrical production "A Midsummer Night's Dream" opens in India, loves reworking familiar classics and giving them a twist.
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VOICING MODERN REALITIES: Tim Supple and (below) a scene from the play. PHOTOS: V.V. KRISHNAN and S. PUSHPAKAR.
SEVEN languages, including Tamil, Marathi, Sinhalese, Bengali and English, and a young 22-member cast made up of young Indian and Sri Lankan actors from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Director Tim Supple's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a unique theatrical production that opens in India before going to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company Complete Works Festival.
The play, which took two years to get off the ground and which was rehearsed over the last few months in Pondicherry, is commissioned by the British Council and is the first Indo-UK theatre production. Supple, who has worked closely with the Royal Shakespeare Company and who was a former Artistic Director of the Young Vic, is regarded as the "leading storyteller in British theatre". The Director, who recently staged a brief 20-minute preview of the play in New Delhi, took some time off rehearsals to speak to The Hindu. Extracts from the interview:
You seem to have developed an India connection. You adapted Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Midnight's Children. You brought "The Comedy of Errors" to this country. And now there is "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with a cast largely drawn up from India. Isn't there a certain continuity here?
I think there is a continuity. You can't always pinpoint why these things happen. I didn't have any reason to become particularly interested in India or to work with British Indian authors [for Haroun and Midnight's Children] but that's what happened. The reason is quite simple. Over the years as a director, the kind of theatre I have most grown to love is the kind very influenced by ways of making theatre in India. I didn't know that then, but I have discovered it.
Which brings me to the next question. Isn't there a continuity at a dramatic level between "Haroun", "Midnight's Children" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? There is the play as a kind of storytelling; there is the use of music, colour, light, energy...
Very much. I had a fairly conventional theatrical upbringing. As a child, I went to see "Peter Pan", Shakespeare. As a young student, I got interested in American and European theatre. Then, in 1990, I did some experimental work on the Epic of Gilgamesh. I took a group of actors and worked with a composer — a musician — who had travelled a lot in India. And he opened my eyes to a whole new way of working with stories, with music and with actors. This had a big influence on me. I did many many pieces ... I adapted Grimm's stories; I adapted The Jungle Book, which is another Indian connection; I adapted Haroun, tales from Ovid and that began to affect the way I did other pieces like Shakespeare. So yes, there is a real thread, a real connection there.
And this is what you like doing most? Reworking familiar classics, giving them a twist?
Absolutely. It is great in a way working with things familiar because the audience has a shared feeling for it. When you produce something like "A Midsummer Night's Dream", there is a shared bank of knowledge of it. But then to find freshness, a new voice for this story is also very exciting.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream", one of Shakespeare's most frequently adapted plays, is tailor-made for this.
That's true of a lot of Shakespeare though. With this version, we have not adapted it; we have translated the text very faithfully into the different languages. But it is an adaptation in the sense is that I have opened myself and the play up to the realities and influences of contemporary India. That makes the play different of course, but in a sense it is a very faithful line-by-line production... we have not changed any lines.
It is a contemporary Indian production. Contemporary India is an extraordinary range of possibilities and this could mean absorbing something particular like Kalari or stick fighting. I am not going pretend that this production is set in Elizabethan England or Greece. It comes from where it comes from and expresses certain realties of modern India — multilingualism, the range of traditional practice and also what you might call metropolitan practice. You know, it simply speaks a voice that is made up of different sounds, different sources of contemporary India.
There is another sense in which "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is ideal for adaptation. There is no written source from which it is drawn. It is totally invented and you don't need to be weighed down by the fact that you are dealing with another source.
Exactly. It has this expansive canvas, which is very social. You have the very rich and the poor. And then you have the supernatural. You go from the court to the forest. In a way, it is like a very sophisticated, highly intelligent folk play. Which means it plugs into some of the basic functions of stories in our hearts. Which makes it very adaptable.
What were the special challenges of working with a cast, many of who are not familiar with English?
The challenges in rehearsal are the things that will produce your best results. Of course, it is a challenge that I can't speak to the whole group as easily as I do to you. We have to translate and it is very slow. But that's good, then I can't speak as much (laughs). Too much speaking can get in the way. So we have to find other ways of communication.
People not knowing Shakespeare meant we had to spend a lot of time on Shakespeare. We had to spend a lot of time on the rhythm, on how you speak it. And then we would look at the English and then we would learn lessons that we would apply to the other languages. That takes time. That takes work. But I find it very exciting to work with actors who don't come in the room saying, "I know how to do this." So we all learn together.
Isn't it true that a play that uses a multiplicity of languages — so many that few, if any, in the audience would understand all of them — cannot be done conventionally? That it needs to be hinged together by the use of a high degree of energy, by the use of dramatic techniques such as dance and music?
Absolutely. As you suggested in the beginning, I am naturally in love with that way of making theatre anyway. I love theatre that has energy. That is resourceful, inventive, alive, physical, colourful, has music... and a kind of theatrical spirit. So you are right... this needed that. You wouldn't want seven people standing around on stage in a conventional way speaking different languages. You need people to be locked in a kind of communication and then the audience will accept different tongues. You can then relax in the audience and say, "I don't understand this person, but I am going to go with it."
You say that you allowed your actors to speak in the language they were most comfortable with. But all the major women characters speak in English and this makes at least half the exchanges with their husbands and lovers comprehensible to an English speaking audience. Was this a concession to intelligibility?
No I wouldn't say it was designed. But it might have been instinctively structured. The truth is that a lot of women in India would not have been able to engage physically on stage the way these women have to. They would not have been comfortable with that and it so happened that a lot of these women were non-English speaking. So as I went around the country auditioning, it was only when I got to Mumbai that I found women who could perform Shakespeare in that way, as I felt it had to be done.
("A Midsummer Night's Dream" stages at Delhi (April 1, 2, 3), Mumbai (April 10,11,12), Chennai (April 19, 20, 21) and Kolkata (April 28, 29, 30))
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