Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Tim Supple
Dash Arts and Luminato, Canon Theatre, Toronto
June 7-15, 2008
Luminato has brought Toronto a favourite Shakespearean comedy in a production like none you’ve seen before. This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was created in India by British director Tim Supple with a cast and creative team from India and Sri Lanka. It’s a view of a western classic as seen from the other side of the world. As if to emphasize this the play is performed with about a third of the lines in English mingled with the rest in untranslated Hindi, Tamil, Mayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Sanskrit and Sinhala. If you have never seen the play before it before, you may find this production confusing or frustrating. If, however, you’ve already seen several conventional productions, this one will strike you as fascinating and exhilarating.
To speak in great generalities, Western theatre is more text-oriented while Eastern theatre is more spectacle-oriented. Beginning from the stance of spectacle, the multilingualism is not a major issue, and, in fact, all of the key plot points happen to be spoken in English. The action is accompanied throughout by three on-stage musicians and the spectacle itself is breathtaking. The play is presented as a ritual initiated and concluded by Puck (the agile and engaging Ajay Kumar), who masquerades as Philostrate in the court scenes. When the first court scene is over out from the paper-covered back wall burst the wild, frenetic fairies, who immediately commence complex stick-fighting. They are all acrobats adept at rope-climbing and aerial silk acrobatics. It is magical when Titania goes to sleep in a silk cocoon high off the ground or when Puck literally captures the four lovers in a web in the forest.
These are not at all the cosy sprites of “Merrie Olde England” but fierce forces of nature. In Shakespeare, the magic juice Puck squeezes into the lovers’ eyes cause love. Here it causes insatiable lust. Bottom (the very comic Joy Fernandes), receives not just the usual head of an ass but the genitals, too, so that Titania’s infatuation descends from mere love of the ugly to outright bestiality. The fact that Theseus (an imposing P.R. Jijoy) and Hippolyta (an imperious Archana Ramaswamy) reveal that under their gorgeous regal garb they are the savage Oberon and Titania, shows, as with Puck/Philostrate, that the fairy world is really the animal side of human nature that society represses. Overflowing with music, dance and colour this is a beautiful, sensuous production that bypasses language to get to the essence of Shakespeare’s story.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-06-10.
Photo: Company of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
2008-06-10
A Midsummer Night’s Dream