To direct a play is a process of making the word flesh. When the words are Mahesh Dattani's, the flesh is already contained within the word; the written texts are only fully realised through the process of performance.

There's something very "Indian" about this. Mahesh loves the traditional art forms, especially Bharatanatyam which is integral to Dance Like A Man. His plays fuse the physical and spacial awareness of the Indian theatre with the textual rigour of western models like Ibsen and Tennessee Williams. It's a potent combination, which shocks and disturbs through its accuracy and its ability to approach a subject from multiple perspectives. Post-colonial India and multi-cultural Britain both have an urgent need for a cultural expression of the contemporary; they require public spaces in which the mingling of eastern and western influences can take place. Through his fusion of forms and influences, Mahesh creates such a space. This is in itself a political and social statement of astonishing force.

In 1996, Mahesh came to London to work with me on the first British production of Bravely Fought the Queen. We performed at two London venues and in Leicester. Mahesh and I had collaborated before, on Playpen's production of The Tempest (1995); and had already established a level of honesty which is unusual in a profession notorious for its fragile egos. Mahesh is a rare creature: a theatre practitioner who (to echo Stanislavski) loves art and not himself in art. Painstakingly, he worked with the actors to recreate his text in a form which suited their approach to performance: a subtextual approach characteristic of actors with a western training. Watching this was an object lesson in openness, responsiveness, and cross-cultural collaboration. To Mahesh, a play is never really finished. Plays only really happen in the theatre, as ephemeral events. the apparently permanent printed text is just one approximation to what might occur when the piece is performed.

In our production, the constantly shifting nature of Mahesh's stage space became the starting point for a kaleidoscopic approach to the text. Our set centred on a slightly abstract inner space, furnished with three white blocks, which represented the Trivedi household and the office. The only naturalistic element in this area was the bar: a glowing blasphemous shrine to alcohol, with the all-seeing eye of the television above it. Around this central area was another world: red and dusty, full of torn newspapers, discarded whisky bottles and cigarette packets, the beggar-woman's tarpaulin, a wheelchair. This was an India at once alluring and terrifying, both for the bourgeois characters of the play and its western audience. This was the world of Kanhaiya, the sexually alluring young cook who might or might not be Krishna; of the dark auto driver who embodies Nitin's sexual guilt; of Alka's liberating dance in the rain; and of Baa, the living embodiment of the past with its attendant guilt and shame. Baa, white-haired in a white sari, wandered constantly through this space, her presence undercutting the apparent naturalism, and upsetting the fragile fictions which the characters had created.

This is a play about performance; and uses theatre to demonstrate how, in a world of hypocrisy, acting becomes a way of life. Paradoxically, it is only by the overt performance of the theatre that such acting can be exposed for what it is. For example, when Dolly reveals the fact that her child was seriously disabled at birth by Jiten's violence, she begins to dance as Daksha would dance - disjointedly, wildly, with ever-increasing frenzy, until at last she breaks down with gut-wrenching grief. Every night, as I watched this extraordinary moment, I was moved by its deep theatrical purity. Siddiqua Akhtar was performing as Dolly; Dolly as Daksha; Daksha was performing a dance. By exploiting layer upon layer of performance, of unreality, Mahesh allowed his actress a route to emotion in its rawest form: the pain, the anguish in the blood-knot of the family which is his constant theme.

“Isn't that the way she dances?” It seems an innocuous line on the page. But this is writing beyond words: this is theatre.

Michael Walling