Spotlight on Shakespeare: The supernatural is in the East, proves Luminato's A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Luminato Festival
The National Post

There's a line in A Midsummer Night's Dream about "the spiced Indian air," and the production that Luminato has brought to Toronto is legitimately drenched in it. The play also tells us that Oberon, king of the fairies, has come "from the farthest step of India;" whether he lives there, or was just holidaying, isn't revealed, but the Elizabethans associated the supernatural with the East. Either way, this production, directed by the British Tim Supple and cast with actors from all over India and Sri Lanka, has more than exoticism going for it. It has authenticity.

It was first staged in New Delhi in 2006, was then adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and seems to have been touring ever since. The actors perform in English and, we are told, in some half-a-dozen Indian dialects; sometimes the language changes within the course of a speech. So to get much out of it, you either have to be fluent in several different tongues, or to know the original pretty well. The latter is advisable anyway since this show, like Black Watch, has been booked by Luminato into a big space with terrible acoustics; there are times when you can't tell which language is being spoken. Visually, too, the show probably loses from the lack of intimacy. Still, plenty of spectacle remains; and so does a great deal more.

Some scenes in this version make more sense than ever before, and not just the supernatural ones. The plight of Hermia, threatened with death or a nunnery if she refuses to wed the man of her father's choice, is a lot more immediate when set in a world that knows of arranged marriage, and even of enforced wifely sacrifice. When daddy (J. Jayakamur) relents, that carries weight, too. The now-customary doubling of Oberon with Theseus (P. R. Jijoy) and Titania with Hippolyta (Archana Ramaswamy) comes over as something more than routine; the mortal pair really learn from the travails of their dream-doubles. Titania, as it happens, is as sexy as hell; also mad as hell when Oberon demands custody of her changeling boy (who is rewardingly present) and horrified to her roots when she discovers the trick he's played on her. Horrified but not deeply shaken: So she's had sex with a man transformed to a donkey -- if you're immortal you get over it.

The production has been compared to Peter Brook's famous 1970 version, and they have things in common. A gym-like set; pervasive use of seemingly home-made music, joyous or eerie; actors who double as acrobats, though as much here out of sheer high spirits as to simulate magic; a bed that hangs suspended in air, though it doesn't in this case represent Titania's bower. When she retires to sleep, or when the mortal lovers do, they're cocooned, marvellously, in giant pods; when they're subsequently discovered-- the mortals anyway -- they're entwined in pairs. Sumant Jayakrishnan's set seems composed, initially, of silver foil: a flimsy back wall through which the actors erupt when we move from town to forest.

Helena (Shanaya Rafaat) and Hermia (Yuki Elias) seem to have been to an English boarding-school. They handle the original verse more expressively than anyone else and build a persuasive relationship of shared confidences and mutual jealousies, though it fades as the play goes on. The presiding spirit is Puck (Ajay Kumar) whose "what fools these mortals be" is stupendous in its other-worldy detachment. In the most astonishing visual sequence of the show, he ties intricate silken ropes around the quarrelling lovers so that they end up, most appropriately, in a boxing-ring.

This show is more insistently erotic than Brook's, and more entertainingly. When Bottom (Joy Fernandes) turns ass, his outsize ears are less noticeable than his outsize phallus: a joke that you might expect to, well, subside early on but that remains potent, in all sorts of ways. Its memory lingers on into his awakening, when he arrives at "me-thought I had..." and does not dare to elaborate. This whole speech in fact is miraculous, the crown of an entrancingly self-important performance, whose satisfied solemnity with the English language may recall Borat to some and Peter Sellers to others. (If that sounds racist, too bad; the sizeable Asian proportion of the audience were laughing too.) Quince (Vivek Mishra) is a bearded village elder, and the amateur actors' scenes of consultation and rehearsal are delightful. So much so that when the play of “Pyramus and Thisbe” actually arrives, it is -- apart from Quince's prologue, which is super --an anti-climax.

There are other imperfections. Some of the play feels skated over, whatever the language. There is a long dance sequence that communicates hardly anything except the desire to have a long dance sequence. But at the end, all, as Puck says, is mended. As he delivers his valediction, the other actors stomp and sway behind him, joyously and hypnotically. It really feels like magic. More and rarer than that, it really feels like a dream.