Fun & Entertainment

A few minutes into Saturday afternoon's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Her Majesty's Theatre in Adelaide, the whispering and shuffling began. Uh-oh, looks like a few people did not know the production, with its ensemble of Indian and Sri Lankan performers, features little English and no surtitles.

The Bard in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Sinhalese? How would we know what was going on? While a familiarity with the text helps, the director Tim Supple's acclaimed production at the Adelaide Festival is a mesmerising and magical dream, full of energy and emotion with a dash of Bollywood colour.

About 10 per cent of the production is in English and, without the familiar Shakespearean language, the audience can only surrender to the plot and its themes, and the very good performances of these actors, dancers, musicians and acrobats. Here, a head wobble is worth a thousand words.

The Indian music and dance are hypnotic as a mohawked Puck (Ajay Kumar) wreaks havoc and Cupid's arrows miss their mark. The Rude Mechanicals - a collection of Indian tinkers, tailors and street sellers - indulge in fine physical comedy. Joy Fernandes is a standout as Bottom, putting the ass in sass, thanks to an outrageous contribution from the props department.

The forest fairies are played by acrobats who dance, swing from ropes and scamper over a wooden frame on stage. As the action reaches its peak, they party to the beat of Indian drums, and the final Bollywood-inspired number left this audience beaming.

It is a highlight in the final program of the festival director, Brett Sheehy, and comes to the Sydney Theatre this month for the Sydney Theatre Company.

There was different emotion at Friday's festival opening, during the Australian premiere of Ainadamar, directed by Graeme Murphy. The opera, with music by Osvaldo Golijov and a libretto by David Henry Hwang, is based on the life and death of the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, a darling of the Spanish revolution.

Nobody knows how Lorca died but here he is shot in Granada, at Ainadamar, Arabic for fountain of tears. His execution is shown as a vision of his muse, Margarita Xirgu, an actress telling Lorca's story on her deathbed.

The foyer chatter seemed divided। Many were moved by the exquisite music (a CD with the soprano Dawn Upshaw won two Grammys in 2006) and beautiful staging। There was fine singing from the mezzosoprano Kelley O'Connor as Lorca and Jessica Rivera as Margarita। It is a beautiful production, with curved screens, a wall of water, a black-clad female chorus of flamenco dancers from the Adelaide Vocal Project and the fluid movements of the dancer Jan Pinkerton.
But some were not so taken, finding it difficult to engage with the performers. It did feel as if the emotion had been washed away by all that water. Lorca's execution, with the sound of gunfire morphing into a staccato beat for the flamenco-dancing chorus, should have been moving and powerful but it was difficult to connect with the drama on stage. The clumsy projections of bulletholes and flowing blood on the screens on stage did not help, and the sound seemed muffled.

Far more moving is Andrew Bovell's play When The Rain Stops Falling, which had its world premiere at the festival. It plays with time in its search for hope in an uncertain world. This epic, stretching from 1959 to 2039, follows four generations of a family and deals with family legacies, abandonment and betrayal, with an undercurrent of climate change (cue: sound of flushing toilets).

It begins in the future with a long-extinct fish falling from the sky and landing with a wet thud. The action then shifts back and forth in time, keeping the audience on its toes and practising mental arithmetic.

One of the central twists is a bit of a stretch and the work is slow to get going but, once it does, it is engrossing and moving. There are strong performances, especially from Kris McQuade and Carmel Johnson, and the set design by Hossein Valamanesh is beautifully simple, as is the lighting from Niklas Pajanti. Quentin Grant's music adds to the sense of loss and dislocation.

Bovell has said he regards the work as melancholy rather than bleak, and by the end there is hope for a new generation to learn from the past in shaping the future, on personal and global scales.