Interviewer: Another thing I was excited by was the variations in the cast. What considerations did you have and how exciting and how challenging was it selecting them from different parts of India given the range of personalities, looks and abilities?

Tim: Sure, I mean the process of choosing the cast was very important in the process of making the play. I took a long time over it. I travelled for over a year, I met many many people, I watched people' s work, and I worked with people for a long time before casting them, days, weeks sometimes. And I put people together in different ways until I discovered who it was that I needed to work with. But I asked... in the end it was three things that really made the difference. First of all people had to excite me, their performance had to excite me of course. Secondly, they had to be right for the part, I mean obviously in the end I couldn' t cast anybody unless they had a role to play. And thirdly I had to feel that their spirit was positive and could be flexible enough to work with people over a long period of time, there' s no room for people of negative spirit, or strongly egotistical approach to performance. So these were the three things in the end. The process of casting was one of the main stages along the journey of making the production.

Choreographer: I' m going to do some of the sequence from... I' ve taken the elements from Kalaripayttu and Bharatanatyam. Titania and Oberon. The dance is called ' Broke the Ground' . I' m going to try to do something from that.

Choreographer: This art form called Tapaatta. Tapa means ' drum' . Atta means ' dance' , ' drum-dance' . Its from a very rural area. They' re playing for the death, they' re playing for the temple, they' re playing for the body. All kind of ritual. It' s a community, [in this sense] community means lower-class people. They play for others. They' re not professional dancers. They' re profession is agriculture. They partake of the dancing. I learn because we are promoting this art form. 20 years back, nobody' s learn this form. But we promote this, as we are travelling all over the world now. But I use this form in A Midsummer Night' s Dream, that' s why I' m playing it.

Keith: I personally found the piece problematical in many ways, mainly creatively. I think that actually as a production I think in the venue, and in the style of it fitting in the venue, it worked very very well. However, beyond that level which is quite thin, you know actually the content and the tone within the content I find quite difficult in certain areas. Because if you don' t go into the work of Asia, actually a lot of what was done was quite thin and actually a lot of Indian art and art from India has very specific purpose and meaning which I believe that if you know a little bit more about it, this production treated very lightly.

Interviewer: I wondered why Tim chose A Midsummer Night' s Dream in the first place, was it particularly because he felt that text had resonance in India?

Quasar: I don' t know. I think it' s the other way around. It' s a play that he wanted to do for a while. If there' s anything I' ve learnt from Tim, or about Tim, it' s the fact that he doesn' t like seeing things in half measures. He wants to really dig it up, rake it out. So really early on his first thing was, the forest is not a happy place. And that' s how we went about this, we said ok, the forest is not a happy place, then what the hell is it? And then we started discovering the fairies and what happens to the lovers. And the whole design is boiled from that, the fact that the costumes fall apart and all of that. It' s quite an exciting thing and I think he had... he loves the play. Its bizarre, like I said when he told me first we were going to do A Midsummer Night' s Dream I was like no... because, I' m sorry but A Midsummer Night' s Dream is what we do in the seventh and eighth standard in India and it' s, you know, fairies and Puck, and you go through the typical preconceived notions, and immediately I just went ' oh no' . And then I was quite excited that when we went through the text and word, line by line by line, it suddenly really came alive, for me. And I' m still not saying its my favourite Shakespeare play. I was like yeah, yeah lets do King Lear, let' s do Hamlet, let' s do something where people die! But he was like, no, let' s do this, let' s see what happens with this and it' s really his belief, he really believes in the play and I think I believe that this production has come because of these actors. And if you take out three, any three from this ensemble, and you do the same play, it would have been a very different production. Because the influence that people would have come with would have been different. And it really is that. We put everything on the table, we shook the table a little bit for seven weeks, something' s stayed on something' s fell off, and every morning someone else would lead the session, the first session. So the dancers, Bharatanatyam would be lead for a week, then another marshal art then sword-fighting, then stick-fighting. Every morning someone else would lead so they were sharing their skills with the rest of the company. Some things the company took too, some things they didn' t. Some became very important influences in our work, some didn' t. And that' s just fascinating.