ABSTRACT
In the UK the Indian accent has infrequently been utilized in Shakespeare productions for one of two reasons. First, as a marker of colonial servility, very often in marginal characters like Dogberry in the 1976 RSC Much Ado About Nothing and Feste in Trevor Nunn's 1996 Twelfth Night. Second, in productions which shift their context entirely to an Indian or South Asian diasporic one, a move frequently described in reviews as “the bard goes Bollywood.” These productions are responding to a search for novel contexts in Shakespeare performance and include the RSC's 2012 Much Ado About Nothing and Tara Arts 2015 Macbeth, often employing British Asian diasporic actors who must perform a blanket generic Indianness. This article will look at three versions of Twelfth Night that utilize the Indian accent or rather “brown voice,” examining how it is figured both in its presence and its absence. These include the regional accent in Piya Behrupiya (2012), the mocked Indian accent in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996), and the erasure of accent in Tim Supple's self-proclaimed Anglo-Indian Twelfth Night (2003).
