Beautifully ugly
Globally acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes to Ottawa
A waking dream for theatregoers photo: courtesy of NAC
In 2004 the British High Council in India and Sri Lanka commissioned director Tim Supple for a project which captivated him: to direct an iteration of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a product of the fertile artistic soil of the near-Orient. He toured the Indian subcontinent gathering a cast of artists that fired his imagination: trained street actors, itinerant families of acrobats, classical dancers, musicians and martial artists. And the product of this incredible journey has lit up theatres since 2006, packing houses in India, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Usually when I poke curiously around the history of a touring production, it’s something of a survey: find the best reviews, find the worst, and the truth will invariably be suspended somewhere between. But in this case I can find no review, anywhere, which says this show is less than spectacular.
Director Tim Supple still seems inspired even after these years with the show, and speaks enthusiastically about it.
“My desire is to explore every avenue of this play,” he says. “I think that this play demands the most beautiful portrayal of human quality, and also the most ugly, vulgar and visceral, earthy. You’re dealing with the bottom and the top, you’re dealing with the queen of the fairies, and a character literally called Bottom.”
He communicates a vision of the play that is vibrant with rich sensuality and a sense of real magic. He speaks of his fairies as otherworldly beings of primal magic and primal drive, surpassing human appetites for wrath and love, but also for lust, eroticism, danger and pure joy. The humans passing through this alien universe are coloured by it.
“It’s the elevation of the human being to something greater than ourselves, but it’s also the descent of human grandeur into the earth, sex, the visceral. It’s this two-way passage on which the play is actually built.”
Asked about the way the enormously diverse cast of actors embraced a play of a foreign canon, Supple has nothing but praise for the result. “It’s a world away from the gruff, repressed, Victorian ideal that we see in the West. It’s a different kind of tradition. It’s more expressive, less self-contained.”
This same aesthetic of exuberant and electric feeling also emerges in Supple’s praise of designer Sumant Jayakrishnan’s work. “The physical aesthetic comes naturally from India. When you’re working with Indian actors and an Indian designer, you have to work hard not to get beauty from it. It’s part of India’s very nature.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Nov 06, 2008
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=15980
