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Supple take
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Director of the fabulously successful Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tim Supple, tells MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER it is alarmingly easy to get Shakespeare wrong
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Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.
LIFE AFFIRMING Tim Supple: ‘India is a multi-lingual country and the diversity of the cast made it a feasible proposition’
Tim Supple describes William Shakespeare as “a very intelligent man.” The 45-year-old opera and theatre director knows what he is talking about having worked with Kenneth Branagh and Dame Judi Dench in “Coriolanus” apart from
directing “Comedy of Errors” and “As You Like It”. He also helmed the well-received “Twelfth Night” on telly.
In town with his multi-lingual version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Supple says: “Shakespeare was the very opposite of this Hollywood/Bollywood ideal of one love. It is not cynical, it is the truth. ‘Midsummer Night’s dream’ talks of the interchangeabilty of young love.”
Supple goes on to say the forest represents our baser instincts and as we grow up and mature, “we put away our desires like a dream.” If you have ever wondered who the hero of the play is, then Supple says: “There is no hero in the strictest sense. But I would say Bottom is a heroic figure. He is the best written and most lovable. He goes on an extraordinary journey. He spends a night with the queen of fairies and returns a changed man. Even his name, Bottom, is the centre of the body and also the centre of the play. Also, when Bottom is transformed into an ass, as every Elizabethan knew, the donkey was emblematic of supreme sexual prowess.”
Press him for who the most important person in the play is and Supple says: “Oberon and Titania are the head, Bottom is the gut, the lovers are the heart, the fairies are energy and rude mechanicals are the character. Now you tell me, which is the most important part of the body!”
Supple says he chose “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because “it expresses the essence of theatre. It is poised between humour and seriousness, ritual and reality, rich and poor. I wanted to do it for 25 years and when the British Council approached me to do a play in India, I thought this would be a good choice.”
Supple says Oberon and Titania represent the masculine and feminine principal and when they fall out, nature is out of joint. Their quarrel is about control. And when the fight is resolved, all is well with the world. “The play is a ritualistic, cathartic journey.”
Of the many languages in the play, Supple says: “India is a multi-lingual country and the diversity of the cast made it a feasible proposition.”
Supple does not rightly remember his first brush with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. “I must have been seven or eight years old. Over the years I felt that the productions were not very right. Either they were played like a comedy or were over conceptualised.”
And when you venture to say “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is classified as a comedy, Supple patiently explains: “Comedy originally meant about ordinary people while tragedy is about royals and aristocrats.”
About the various versions of Shakespeare in different media, Supple says: ‘“Romeo and Juliet’ works better as a film rather than a play. I like Baz Luhrmann’s (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Daines) version, ‘West Side Story’ as well as the Zeffirelli version.”
Supple maintains one “can easily get Shakespeare wrong” and would rather not trash other people’s visions and versions of Shakespeare. He, however says, Vishal Bharadwaj’s “Maqbool” , an adaptation of “Macbeth”, does not work for him. “It is a totally different story. Macbeth is about an exceptional warrior who is told he would be king and twenty minutes later, kills the king. ‘Maqbool’ works as a Bollywood film as there is a love story between Maqbool and Mrs King while Macbeth had a wife remember!”
Supple who has done adaptations of “Jungle Book” “Grimms Tales” and Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” says he enjoys working with stories about human beings who are not quite human. “I don’t like working with something like ‘Lord of the Rings’ where fantasy becomes the point of the story,” he explains.
In the pipeline is a new version of “Peter Pan”.
“We are casting from China, South America, Europe and India. It is hard working with a multi-racial cast but in the end it is liberating and life affirming.”
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