"Fabulous, bewitching, fierce and charmingly funny."
The Independent on Sunday
Two years in the making, Tim Supple's breathtaking production - featuring seven languages: English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and Sinhalese - calls on the actors to create an integrated performance using newly-learnt skills beyond any set routines. It caused a sensation in India where it toured the major cities.
After a successful run at the RSC's home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the production received raving reviews at the London Roundhouse.
"Tim Supple's Indian A Midsummer Night's Dream entranced just about everyone."
Reviewers reviewed, Sunday Telegraph, 25 March 2007
"Tim Supple's ravishing Indian Dream took Stratford by storm when it opened during the Complete Works festival last summer. Now it expands into the Roundhouse, filling the vast space with its intoxicating, sultry mix of colour, sound and movement. This is one of the most sensual and visually beautiful Dreams I have ever seen."
The Financial Times, Sarah Hemming, 15 March 2007
"A stunning dream to make you laugh in any language. ... A production that must count among the most original since Peter Brook tackled the play in 1970."
The Times, Benedict Nightingale, 15 March 2007
"From beginning to end, this extraordinary production of Shakespeare's woodland romance is a glorious sensory assault. Leaving the theatre after the spectacle ... feels not unlike awakening from a pleasant dream. Stripped of classical dialogue, Tim Supple's production digs to the dramatic heart of Shakespeare and discovers the very essence of his theatre. Spellbinding."
The Independent, Alice Jones, 24 March 2007
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"... for theatrical excitement and fresh insight, this vivid Indian Dream, first seen in New Delhi and subsequently at Stratford last summer, strikes me as being in a class of its own. There is a constant feeling of Shakespeare being minted anew, of a company of superbly committed, versatile and highly individual performers getting straight to the heart of the play without having to plough through accreted layers of tradition. Everything seems fresh, spontaneous and positively throbbing with sensuality."
The Telegraph, Charles Spencer, 15 March 2007
"... a visually ravishing recreation of the play, capturing all its magical strangeness. ... What this production does brilliantly is create a world on stage: one that has echoes of Ovid, Ted Hughes and the Polish critic, Jan Kott, but is also truly Shakespearean. This, we realise, is a play of multiple transformations all wonderfully realised in this visionary sub-continental version." 
The Guardian, Michael Billington, 14 March 2007
"[The Roundhouse's] first theatrical offering is Tim Supple's sensational, sexy and spectacular version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. ... West End musical producers spend millions on technology and special effects to try to make magic. Supple, his actors and designers, together with three musicians whose strings, percussion and wind instruments conjure up gorgeous, atmospheric sound, manage to strike what most of those musicals do not - notes of enchantment."
The Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh, 14 March 2007
Click here to read Tim Supple's production notes
Other reviews from the run at the RSC's home in Stratford-Upon-Avon ...
" ... What was highly impressive in India is sensational in Stratford: in its strangeness, sexuality and communal joy this is the most life-enhancing production of Shakespeare's play since Peter Brook's."
Michael Billington, The Guardian, 9 June 2006
The production toured the four major cities of India - Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta - before heading to Stratford-upon-Avon where it had a truimphant two-week run as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works Festival. It also travelled on to Verona for the Festival Shakespeariano in June 2006.
"The triumph of Supple's production lies in the way everything coheres to the same end: the creation of an act of transformative magic. The production conveys the union of flesh and spirit as the whole company finally joins in a candle-lit chant. We feel that we too have participated in an act of ritual communion."
Michael Billington, The Guardian , 9 June 2006
"...its prompt return to Britain for a longer run must be a matter of urgency."
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph,
"Magically you understand everything and sometimes the switch into an unfamiliar tongue works like a charm, as if the speaker has started
weaving a spell or, more comically, has been driven into an incomprehensible rage. I don't think I've ever seen this play make so much emotional sense."
Kate Bassett, The Independent, 20 June 2006
"This is the most magical, fantastical Dream, and one, I suspect, that will be remembered, and talked about, for decades to come, just like Peter Brooks' landmark staging for the RSC in 1970."
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph, 12 June 2006
"Supple has welded his heterogeneous artistes into a crack ensemble whose manifold skills cohere in a vision of the play that is at once ravishingly beautiful, sexy, wild yet dignified, and delightfully funny."
Paul Taylor, The Independent , 13 June 2006
"This is the kind of dream that leaves you rubbing your eyes and wishing that you never had to wake up... It's Shakespeare brilliantly reimagined: theatre to lose your heart to."
Sam Marlowe, The Times , 10 June 2006
Click on the following links to read full reviews for Tim Supple's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph, 12 June 2006
Sam Marlowe, The Times, 10 June 2006
Michael Billington, The Guardian, 9 June 2006
Mukund Padmanabhan, The Hindu, 2 April 2006