A Midsummer Night’s Dream, again

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ would be a surrealistic experience for the theatre buffs in the city who will gather at the Senate Hall on Wednesday for the Malayalam version of the play directed by Thulaseedhara Kurup.
Kurup has taken Kavalam Narayana Panicker’s translated text of the play for the performance to be presented by former students and MPhil students of the Center for Performing and Visual Arts at the Kerala University.While most directors go for the tragedies while doing a Shakespearean play, Kurup prefers to be different. “It is true that most of Shakespeare’s classics like Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear are tragedies and they are staged over and over again,” said Kurup. “Shakespeare’s comedies are rarely performed on stage and these plays are equally adorable,” he added.
The play is a lively comedy in which the characters are lost in a magical world and the conflict that ensues after the magical forces starts to play upon them. While Shakespeare writes in verses, Panicker has made the text more prose oriented without diluting the essence of the play, said Kurup. Kurup’s craftsmanship as a director is evident from his tweaking the text to ease down the difficult diction of Panicker whenever neccessary. “I have snipped the text wherever the flow of dialogues are affected,” added Kurup. The director hopes the play would deliver a dream-like experience to the audience. “The effect I hope to have on the audience is similar to that the characters of the play experience in the play –– a surreal one,” he said. The things to watch out for in the play are Puck’s magical feat and the ‘play within the play’ sequence. “There is plenty of scope for laughter in the play and the audience is bound to have a jovial time,” he added.
The cast in the play goes like Puck (Sarath Kumar V), Thesius (Jithin George Mathew), Aegius (Firoz), Lysander (Hazim MM), Dimetrius (Zulfiker Salim), Bottom (Santhosh G Nair), Hippolitta (Amitha Damodaran), Hermia (Indulekha L V), Helena (Remya Raj R), Titania (Aswathy Vijayan) and Oberon (Kannan Nayar).