A Midsummer Night's Dream

I had read a lot about the play when it was staged last year. But, unfortunately I was not able to see it. This year again it had come to city with popular demand. Lucky me!!!

It was a cold evening to watch Midsummer Night's Dream by Tim Supple. But the play was extremely fascinating that you are unable to feel anything else.
The air was pierced with loud drumbeats and human screeching. The lights flickered, in a bluish, night glow. People moved with great speed, some half naked, some fully dressed, some resplendent, some stark. They ran, the danced, they climbed, they swung from ropes, they were lulled into uneasy sleep in huge cloth cradles hung from the top. Was this a dream or perhaps a Nightmare... In any case, the twenty first century dreams are more like nightmares.

The most stunning or absolutely breathtaking feature of this play, were the sets, lights and costumes in that order. Literally and truly the stage provided the direction and guidance for the actors and their actions. It was not just a backdrop or a space to perform, but an instigator and a promoter in the structure and acting. In fact, without the stage as it was constructed, the actors could not have performed many of the feats that they did. In any case, as far as this play goes, the stage was not merely a stage, but a supporting actor.

It was practical also, in as much as it allowed the actors to move freely and do all the acrobatics and rope tricks (for there was a lot of all that in this play) without hindering the flow of the play. The spaces, the foreground, the background and the sides were all clearly defined and uncluttered. The backdrop was a wooden screen (construction) made out of bamboo with many squares covered with ordinary white paper that can be torn easily. The actors entered through these squares, tearing the paper, removing it for the second half of the play and once again pasting some more paper for the next day's production. So, it was a living stage, destroyed to some extent every day and then reconstructed the next day. It enhanced the shift from the forest where the dream takes place to the city where reality emerges. The main stage was covered in red soil which along with the wooden construction brought out an extraordinary texture to the space. In short, the stage played its part so well that it was a breathtaking experience to watch the imagination that conceived it and the hands that crafted it.

Two remarkable scenes where the lights played an important part were – one just before the interval, the night scene in the forest, and the other the arrival of dawn in the forest after the nights events.
The play was different in a way ---- with a British director and a South Asian crew speaking not just Shakespeare’s English but Tamil, Sinhalese, Malayalam, Hindi and wo more languages. That made the whole atmosphere interesting and fascinating. It gave some new angle to the play. I have seen so many plays. But this kind of experiment was something very new to me. Being a multi-lingual, multi-cultural script and cast it was not difficult to understand the flow of the play and was quite enjoyable.
Just imagine this whole thing is set up in a outdoor theatre. I have heard that in London's open theatre this play is always running. I hope i will catch that play some day (hopefully). Let's see if my dream turn out to be Midsummer Night's Dream...