SAN FRANCISCO — British director Tim Supple and I are sitting in the balcony stairwell of San Francisco’s Curran Theatre during a matinee performance of his celebrated adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production is cast with Indian and Sri Lankan actors who, in addition to English, occasionally deliver their lines in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Sanskrit, Sinhalese and Tamil, without English surtitles. Soon Supple has his first walkout, a triad of skirt-suited older women tittering about the polyphonic spree onstage. “It’s the language that gets them,” he says, smiling and ruefully, if more than a little defiantly, snapping his fingers. “They’ve given it five minutes.”

Supple and his cast and crew’s run at the Curran has been characterized by such episodes, and by half-capacity crowds. The reviews are strong, as they have been since the play’s UK debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival in 2006, but the play — in the middle of an international tour that brings it to Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival — is proving a difficult sell to its first American audiences. As well it should, perhaps: as Supple is first to acknowledge, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both his version and the text itself, is an inherently tricky thing.
This is a view of the play that works against what many of us are used to, raised as we were on high-school productions stressing its whimsical, light and rounded qualities. And it is one very much in tune with that of Peter Brook, who, with designer Sally Jacobs, reconstituted the work in 1970 as an alienating literalization of the human consciousness, filled with sex and violence. (Incidentally, Supple declares Dream “one of the peaks of genius in [Shakespeare’s] canon, right up there with Lear, Hamlet and The Tempest.”)

As Brook’s did, Supple’s version puts conceptual weight on the “rude mechanicals” plot, in which Bottom (he of the subsequent ass’s head) and a group of other tradesmen practice a play to present at the nuptials of King Theseus and his captured bride Hippolyta. “One has to look with a straight, clear eye on what’s happening to them as human beings — who they are, what they are doing, what they are going through,” says Supple. “And not see them as an opportunity to make humour for the audience. Then you end up with some commitment to the truth and seriousness of the situation, always.”

When asked directly why he decided to emphasize these qualities within this particular cultural-linguistic milieu, he blames, for the most part, circumstance. The project arose not out of any premeditation to reconfigure the play in India, but because of a commission from the British Council there.

“The ‘why’ goes deeper,” admits Supple. “I’ve been brought up in the British theatre; I’ve benefited from all the professional, literary and traditional values of that system. But I’ve also been trying, in a way, to escape the profession, especially the show business aspect of it. What does interest me is the core fact of theatre: a performance and a group of people watching it. And, of course, in India, where theatre is so much in the courtyards and the streets and the jungles — outdoors, in more immediate circumstances where there is no professional structure, where actors are in a purer, rawer relationship with each other and the audience — there is an attraction there, and the place calls to me very deeply.

On an artistic level and a human level, I’m interested in the appeal of and return to some inner, more ancient, qualities within ourselves. I love to straddle [those qualities] and the modern world; I insist on living in both places. And of course India is that: the culture of the society is much, much closer to traditional values, and yet it is also completely contemporary.”

Supple cites the ease with which certain facets of the play were understood by his collaborators. Despite the effort it took to get the actors to see the rude mechanicals as more than mere buffoons (a problem, Supple says, wherever you stage Dream), they brought their knowledge of Indian class stratification to bear on their interpretations. The play’s supernatural plot, involving Titania and Oberon and their fight over a changeling (who, in what the director claims is a coincidence, is in Shakespeare’s text from “the spicèd Indian air”), is in tune with tropes of South Asian theatre, in which, Supple notes, “actors act gods and goddesses all the time.”

The production also contains mise en scène from its country of origin, including beautiful (and often revealing) costumes. The flower juice that Puck applies to the eyes of Titania and the lovers becomes red powder, evocative of sindoor from the Hindu marriage ceremony, and of the festival of colours, Holi. Dream’s dancing and acrobatics are perhaps its strongest, or at least its most accessible, suit, gleefully transcending the language barrier. Actors swing from and climb up ropes and red fabric, and crawl on a massive upstage grid, which is covered in soft paper that is eventually torn away by mischievous fairies.

“It’s never for me about the novelty, or about the concept, never about that,” says Supple, addressing the possibility that this staging might be accused of exoticizing its performers, or repeating colonialist patterns. “What is important is making possible a way of discovering what’s in the play and putting it out there. [Dream] is inspired by a relationship with performers who bring something new to me, and thus to the stage.” Supple compares this collaboration to that of the rude mechanicals, whose makeshift props speak to the circumstances of their play’s production.

Still, though, there’s the sticking point of the language: isn’t it rather elitist to expect newcomers to the play to follow it when it’s only, at best, half intelligible to them? “You have one experience if you know the play and another if you don’t. Both might be frustrating; both might be wonderful,” says Supple. “My favourite performance so far was for 50 Tamil villagers who were living near where we were working. The only character they would have understood would have been the father, and they hardly got any detail, but they absolutely got father-daughter-lovers-workmen-aristocracy-supernatural-donkey. We had as much laughter and engagement from them as we’ve had from anybody since.”