"Shakespeare is a doorway. He is open to everybody," says Tim Supple, director of A Midsummer Night's Dream in India. the most radical production so far in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works festival.
Shakespeare's comedy of love and its illusions, magic and madness, make-believe and masquerade, is played in no fewer than seven Indian and south Asian languages: Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Sanskrit. The English text pokes through at key encounters and turning points.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the story will have no difficulty in following it and will, like the Stratford-upon-Avon audience, be entranced.
This Dream, like Declan Donnellan's all-male, Russian-language Twelfth Night playing at the Barbican, is a reminder of theatre's lingua franca. Taking Shakespeare on a journey into foreign languages, they show that the beating heart of a great play - and these are two of Shakespeare's greatest comedies - is like a buried stream that can be released once we have overcome our familiarity.
The English language, even when it is as stunningly sculpted and distilled as Shakespeare's, is the cladding, not the body of a theatre performance. These productions sharply reveal that an "operatic" connoisseurship of Shakespeare - relishing his greatest arias - is not enough.
Take the matter of Puck and the fairies in the Dream. Since Peter Brook's seminal 1970 production, it has become almost de rigueur to strip them of their fey, almost Arthur Rackham quality. Supple's Indian actors go further: in a heart-stopping moment, the "spirits" (not "fairies"; both words are in the text, and Supple chooses the more resonant) punch their way through huge walls of white paper like artillery shells, twine and clamber around bamboo scaffolding, shin up ropes and hang heads downward from silken banners. Their physicality is boundless, but so is their effortless serenity.
They, just as much as Oberon, could be saying: "Lord, what fools these mortals be." They have the virtuosity and gaze of visitors from another, literally supernatural, world - as does Puck, a muscled, often malign fixer with a mohican haircut who gleefully constructs a cat's cradle of elastic tape to make a labyrinth in which the dream-struck lovers are trapped. An actor of dignity and proud maleness, he seems to be not some captive, Ariel-like servant but on an equal footing with Oberon.
The strength and intricate acrobatics of these actors, born of diverse sources in the Indian theatre, are more than circus displays. Their equilibrium embodies a view of life, detached and yet empathetic, that is perhaps unsurprising coming from a culture that gave birth to Buddha and his praise of equanimity.
The essence of this radiant production (which I'm told will tour England later this year) is the way it works and dances its way from discord to harmony. "The audience," says Supple, who scoured the length and breadth of India to find his actors, "can access the extremes of Shakespeare's play, from its Bottom to the world of spirits." Both views are incarnate in the span of the performance traditions you see in this cast, from broad village farce to refined, courtly drama. Extremes meet here. "The moment of sexual union," says Supple, "brings together upper class, lower class and supernatural in deep harmony."
At the Barbican this week, Declan Donnellan achieves an equally resonant transposition in Twelfth Night, played by an all-male troupe of Russian actors, also plucked from across the whole country.
Here, too, the unfamiliar is reimagined, with the whimsy the play often attracts is dispelled. Toby Belch is not amiable; indeed, at one point he slaps Maria with the brutality of a Russian drunk. Feste is not a figure of melancholic moonshine out of Watteau (as the young Peter Brook made him in his first production at Stratford in 1947); instead he is a senior actor of fastidious, bachelor-like elegance and impassive emotions who seems very much the play's master of ceremonies.
Malvolio is no deflated, pompous killjoy but a buttoned-up man in a morning suit, besotted with love for his mistress. When he reads the forged letter, supposedly from her, his vaulting hopes are painful to behold, and his final "I'll be revenged on the pack of you" is a steel blade of anguish into the closing round dances of reconciliation. It is hard not to feel echoes of Pushkin and Chekhov, who kept insisting to Stanislavki that his plays were, above all, comedies.
Donnellan's Twelfth Night, like Supple's Dream, is performed by an ensemble of actors united by two of the most universal perfomance languages of all: music and theatre. Donnellan's actors thread through the play as a superbly syncopated samba band; Supple's multilingual group (often dialoguing in two different languages) is woven into a soundtrack of subcontinental instruments that erupts into collective song and dance.
This Midsummer Night's Dream performs an act of multiculturalism within Indian culture itself. Barriers of language and even of caste are ignored in the service of a larger tale to tell. Even if we are ill equipped to notice all the gradations that are being transcended, what Supple calls the "deep harmony" gets to us.
There was one jarring note in the performance I attended at the RSC's Swan theatre: the audience was completely white. We were less than half and hour from Birmingham, and there wasn't an Asian face in the house. Supple, however, says that when his company, Dash Arts, takes over the management of the English tour, there will be mixed audiences.
White English people in the audience will be able to reflect that Shakespeare's multiplicity beyond monolingualism represents a free and better kind of English identity than the St George cross-waving chauvinism with which we're currently afflicted. And British Asians will be able to see a superb example of what mulitcultural meshing can be, at least in the sphere of the imagination.
Theseus, in the final scene of the Dream, reminds his wife-to-be that imagination can mend things. More frontier-crossing work like these productions, played to inclusive audiences, may even begin to heal some of our current woes.
