Backstage with theatre director Tim Supple

You've directed so many plays. What is the fine line of difference between a good director and a bad one?
That's an interesting question and not easy to answer. The truth is that a good director can sometimes make bad theatre and a bad director can sometimes make good theatre. That is because the director is only one element of the amorphous mass of what goes into theatre - there's the content, the text, the actors, the design and the audience to name a few other crucial things.
Certainly I would say that a good director must have the ability to work skilfully with their collaborators and that they must understand well the science of theatre. These are the two essential things. Other than that, there are so many ways to be a good director it's hard to generalise.
For me, a director's greatest task is to work well with actors - they are the medium through which we work. But other good directors would say something different. The other essential thing for me is humility: it was not so long ago that theatre got on very well without directors: we are the new kid on the block and we don't create core material (like writers, composers and artists). Ours is a new contribution to an ancient art so we should avert our eyes a bit. However good a director thinks he is, you can still go and see a children's performance in a school of a six-year-old and have a better time than any number of boring 'adult' shows made by overpaid people who think that they are so smart! We must never forget that beautiful truth about theatre. The really valuable stuff is unpredictable and live and intangible.

Having shown your work in a vast number of countries, would you say there are cultural differences in how audiences from different countries review or receive your plays?
On a superficial but interesting level, yes: on a deep and even more interesting level, no! Audiences in USA are different to UK who are different to Germany who are different to Russia who are different to Egypt who are different to India and so on... This is to do with so many factors, some cultural (attitudes to gathering in public, attitudes to paying, attitudes to words and ideas and the history and relevance of theatre to their lives, what makes people laugh etc), and some more practical (how much theatre people see, whether it is commercial or free, who gets to see it from what economic group, what venues are like etc).
On a deeper level, it is clear that many things are felt and experienced in similar ways in different places and languages - we toured A Midsummer Night's Dream all over the world and certain moments achieved EXACTLY the same reaction everywhere. This suggests that certain things, such as the working man Bottom turning into a donkey and spending a night of love with the Queen of the Fairies, might be archetypal and universal. I am more interested in this question than in anything and am spending the rest of my life trying to find out. The question is made more tantalising and mysterious by the fact that of course you never know for sure what an audience is en masse thinking and feeling - and only a fool would talk with confidence about it.

Which has been your most difficult work produced so far?
There have been difficult works that I see as failures such as my stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and that was just too big and complex a novel and we tried to adapt it with very little time. I count the most difficult of all however - and not unsuccessful - as The One Thousand and One Nights I created in 2011. This had many challenges that I found very interesting - the material was 3,000 pages long; the casting and creating was done throughout the Arabic countries in the midst of the turbulence and uprisings of 2010/2011; we had to shift our huge rehearsals from Egypt to Morocco and transport all our cast and crew to ancient Fes to rehearse in a beautiful old Palais with no facilities; we were beset by unpredictable issues such as rare storms and visa issues while at the same time the actors were under great stress given what was going on in their homes; and finally we shifted to Toronto in Canada to finish and premiere the show but then found North American circumstances so different and limiting compared to Morocco... When we opened in Toronto, the show was hours too long and half the audience had left by the end and then when we had to cancel our performances in Chicago because the USA government refused visas, it seemed that we would never make it to Edinburgh Festival. We did and it was a sellout triumph!

You're not new to India. Your Midsummer Night's Dream aka The Indian Dream (created in India) has received much acclaim. Tell us more about it.
That's a big story to tell! In a nutshell: In 2005, I travelled to many different places in India to meet actors and see theatre. I chose to do AMND because I felt that it would embrace the different theatre traditions and languages I was seeing and I was excited by the thought of that play in India. I cast a wonderful group from all over who between them acted in seven different languages. We rehearsed for two months in 2006 in the idyllic Adishakti near Pondicherry - the creation of the recently deceased genius Veenapani Chawla - and opened the show in a four city tour of purpose-built venues in India. Up to this point, the show was all paid for the BC in India and it was a beautiful experience: rich and satisfying. I loved not only the Indian artists I worked with (the designers and musicians and stage team were brilliant as well as the actors) but also the audiences. We were then invited to the RSC in Stratford Upon Avon UK where the show was a huge success and that launched a tour that took us to London, across the UK, to Europe, Australia, Canada and USA where after 300 performances to 200,000 people, we finished in December 2008. It is the best work I have ever done: it really LIVED. Its vitality and spirit lifted people wherever we went and it communicated totally despite the different languages and the lack of translations. It was a joy.

Your message to young directors?
Keep learning from anyone you respect and keep directing and trusting your own self-criticism.