In The Swan it inevitably seems more enclosed than in a Chennai amphitheatre; but that gives more focus to Sumant Jayakrishnan’s brilliant design. The most eye-opening moment comes when the fairies burst through a paper-clad back-wall with demonic, stick-wielding frenzy. But the production is filled with images of suggestive, poetic beauty: Archana Ramaswamy’s raven-haired Titania at one point curls up in a womb-like bower created out of red silk only to emerge from it as if re-born. On a more basic level, Bottom is whirled around by fairy cords attached to a torpedo-like phallus suggesting he is led by something more than the nose.

But the big talking-point, literally, is Supple’s use of seven different tongues with English constituting roughly half the spoken text. The result, unpredictably, is to heighten attention to language because the action is perfectly suited to the word. When Helena, pursuing Demetrius, announces “Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase” the Ovidian allusion is enriched by the sight of her fiercely stalking her prey. And when Lysander rejects Yuki Ellias’s sparky Hermia as “you bead, you acorn” he turns on her with hate-filled eyes that reinforce the meaning. Although a ravishing spectacle, this is a production rooted in textual uderstanding.

You see this most clearly with the mechanicals led by Joy Fernandes’s matchless Bottom. All too often Bottoms seek laughs: Fernandes, a bulky man with a porpoise-like lightness, allows them to come to him by the simple device of taking himself seriously. When, awaking from his phallic fantasy, he says “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream” it is with the moving sobriety of a man who wants to be remembered. Equally the Pyramus-Thisbe episode is played not as the usual gagfest but as an earnest undertaking by a group of determined worker-actors; which makes it touching as well as funny.

But the triumph of Supple’s production lies in the way everything coheres to the same end: the creation of an act of transformative magic. In a sense the evening is controlled by Ajay Kumar’s racoon-haired Puck lustrating a downstage symbol, simultaneously divine and phallic. And the production conveys the union of flesh and spirit as the whole company finally joins in a candle-lit chant devised by the music director, Devissaro. As in all the great Dreams, we feel that we too have participated in act of ritual communion.

Michael Billington is the theatre critic of The Guardian, UK. This article is reprinted with the author’s permission.