The divine pork butcher

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

You can already see signs of this happening. In the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Roundhouse, the play is performed in seven Indian languages plus English (mostly rather broken). The actors flit up and round scaffolding, swirl and swaddle themselves in brightly coloured scarves and burst through paper screens to a rapturous reception from the audience. Now and then fragments of Shakespeare’s words break through. The programme says rather severely that Indian audiences, let alone English ones, are not to mind if they cannot understand three-quarters of what the actors are saying, because

their unreasonable expectation of mono- lingual drama arises not only from habituation to that mode, but also from the tyranny of literary studies dependent on the reading of books printed necessarily in one, ‘pure’ language, even more so when that language is the revered Bard’s very own English.

I like those inverted commas round ‘pure’, suggesting that those who prefer to hear stuff in their own lingo are imperialist racist fascists. The director of the production, the gloriously named Tim Supple, concedes that ‘the original text has a special quality, whether Shakespeare or Schiller.’ That’s nice of him. But, the Supple One continues, ‘on the other hand, I can’t accept the superiority of any language’. Not even a language you can understand? Ah well, these insubstantial pageants do fade. Still, the punters loved it. And the rest of us can stay at home with our Collected Works and our Nuttall.