In the last few years, British theatre director Tim Supple has been a travelling troupe of one. He's staged English classics in China, Iranian epics in London, and Arabic folk tales in Toronto. Interestingly, he developed itchy feet while in Mumbai. In 2004, after two decades of working on the London stage, he'd come to India to direct a hybrid version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The cast of 70 was a wild bunch, comprising actors trained in European schools and the National School of Drama, aerial dancers and classical dancers, movement performers and street performers. It interweaved seven Indian languages, and idioms such as Bharatanatyam and kalaripayattu, and became a global hit.

Today, he's back in India to create an international ensemble of actors for one project, "a trilogy of three different, seminal, legendary texts, from cultures that have intermingled over the years." He's finalised two: the Arabic bedtime story, One Thousand and One Nights; and Shahnameh, an epic poem about the history of Iran; the third will be an Indian text.