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The Making of the DreamTim Supple, director of Dash Arts, talks about how the company's Indian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream came about. Dateline: 25th September, 2007Early in 2004, I got an email from Carole Mcfadden at the London office of the British Council. Would I like to create a production in India and Sri Lanka? There was only one possible answer. I had first visited India in 1997 with the RSC and it had had a deep effect on me - I had always wanted to return and work. Later in 2004, I met Alice Cicolini, head of arts at the British Council in Delhi, in Marylebone, London. The exciting scope and ambition of the project was immediately clear. It would unite the efforts in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Colombo in producing a new piece to tour. Like all good producers, Alice had a clear idea of what she wanted in broad terms - a large scale work with popular potential that embraces artists from different regions - but wanted me to shape the specifics around my own instincts and needs. When we met the key questions were open. There was only one way to start: a visit. In preparation I read Indian folk tales, modern Indian poets and novelists, stories from the Mahabarata and Ramayana and other classic texts and poems. I thought about Gilgamesh and The Arabian Nights - and Shakespeare. We had resolved to take the project to the UK if possible and the RSC had made it clear that if we were to chose a Shakespeare play they would be interested in inviting it to Stratford as part of the epic Complete Works Festival. In January I travelled to Delhi, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai to meet, listen to and see the work of artists. I saw how little financial support there is ("How do you manage?" I asked one venue manager in Kolkata. "We don't," was the inevitable reply) and how multi-skilled Indian performers have to be. I saw the drive to preserve the wealth of traditional and folk performance and to adapt it to forge a modern theatre. I saw the fine line between the desire to imitate Western theatre and the attempt to re-fashion it on Indian terms. I opened my mind to the particular greatness of Indian theatre - less tangible, less modern, less structured than ours and often fashioned with basic design and rough execution. But in soulless urban theatres, underneath the warm night sky in a street in Chennai, in a hot dusty courtyard in Delhi and in the jungle outside Kolkata, I was moved again and again by the essential art of theatre. The joy of performance, the skills of actors and musicians laid bare, the lack of vanity and the effortless communication between performers and audiences. What most struck me was the potent balance between highly refined form and raw necessity and the exhilarating co-existence of ancient and modern. We began our search for designers, producers, advisors. We received plenty of warnings: too big, too top-down, too many different languages and cultures of performance, too little technical and professional expertise. One senior director in Kolkata predicted it would be 'a disaster'. We took all this to heart - along with all the encouragement and excitement that came our way. And it fed into the decision to chose A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had been planning to direct the play for years and was inspired by the prospect of doing it in India. I knew that Indian performers, with their great variety of approaches to performance, would bring special qualities to the play - and that the play would welcome the variety. And I sensed that The Dream, Shakespeare's most perfectly composed play, would provide a strong architecture to house and nurture the disparate elements of our collaboration. By the end of the trip I knew that I wanted to work with a completely Indian team. We would recruit the creative and production team as part of the next trip. On my last day, I sat with Alice in the British Council office in Delhi and planned a workshop/ audition trip that would take place in Delhi, Kolkata, Manipur, Chennai, Bangalore, Kerala, Sri Lanka, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. If the scale of this trip was not daunting enough, the budget for the project was frightening and clearly needed sponsorship. In April I returned for four weeks. Alice had appointed a production manager who became my close companion - a remarkable young man called Shankar Arora. Together we crisscrossed the sub-continent flying many thousands of kilometers and working with hundreds of performers, musicians and choreographers. I worked with an extraordinary range of artists. We had sessions where realistic actors worked with dancers and folk artists worked with experimental physical performers. We had musicians, singers and children. And most interesting of all, people acted in whatever language was most natural to them. Dialogues sprung up between English and Bengali, Hindi and Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and Sinhalese. It was clear that our production had to be multi-lingual: to restrict ourselves to performers who worked in English would be to miss out on a wealth of different ways of making theatre and telling stories - of seeing life and our trials of love, terror and social conflict that make up the canvas of the play. It would also be a lie. India is multi-lingual, Indian theatre is multi-lingual and whatever else a Shakespeare production might do, it should seek to reflect the time and place in which it is made with vivid honesty. As well as people we were searching for places. We were looking for the best possible venue in each city and this led us to interesting and rarely used outdoor venues - in the case of all but one it would mean building our own auditorium. Finding the right place to rehearse was equally important. We wanted a location that would help us work well for seven weeks away from our homes. We looked outside the big cities and when Shankar took me to Veenapani Chawla's ashram in Pondicherry - Adishakti - I knew it was the place. Peaceful, beautiful, lovingly built, it offered a tremendous rehearsal building with a small outdoor amphitheatre and clean, simple accommodation for all of us. We had found our home. Choosing the cast was harder. I made a shortlist of around a hundred performers. Near the end of my trip, I phoned Alice and suggested we organise a week's work in Mumbai for as many as we could afford to bring there. This would allow us not only to discover more about individuals but also to discover more about the way we should work together on the play. Despite the cost and extra work, Alice agreed. We capped the number at 60 and invited the creative team I was most keen to work with. The week would be the beginning of a shared sense of direction and purpose. In July I was back in Mumbai - in the Experimental Theatre in the NCPA with sixty exceptional performers. In the room we had at least eight different first languages and a staggering variety of artists from every region I had visited. The week was rare and memorable - with all the generosity, curiosity and openness necessary for rigorous work, laughter and exhilaration. The job in hand was to bring Shakespeare to life through the particular combination of skills in the room. And to sense which combination might do this most vividly. This was achieved and choosing the final 22 was difficult and would take me another month. By the end of August the cast and creative team were confirmed. By the end of September a sponsorship deal was in place. In November, the designers came to London for two weeks of intensive discussions and left with an outline design. I sent a list of rehearsal needs to Shankar and his team and we were ready to begin. On 30th December, I left my family at four in the morning in a cottage in Scotland and drove through the eerie stillness of snow-covered hills with the temperature hovering around minus five degrees. I landed in Chennai at one in the morning on New Year's Eve. The cast arrived through the day and rather shyly we celebrated the new year's arrival. Appropriately we found ourselves under a bright, warm night sky - just us, The Dream and seven weeks to bring it to life.
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