Some would go so far as to say that in the landmark year when Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company is marking the 400th death anniversary of William Shakespeare, the Indian actress Ayesha Dharker has won “the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in her field”.

She features prominently in all the RSC’s posters, having landed a key role in its main offering in 2016. And Ayesha herself responds: “I have fallen in love with the RSC — completely.”

That’s easy to understand, not simply because the RSC has cast her in the crucial role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in its current production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, but also because it is a very political organisation.
And like the RSC, almost certainly the most prestigious drama group in the world, Ayesha believes passionately in the political power of theatre, not simply to entertain middle class folk who can buy the expensive tickets (£30 or more in Britain), but to transform the lives of disadvantaged children.

The RSC has also been very political in the way it has deliberately gone out of its way to cast non-whites in central roles — and Ayesha is clearly one of its favourites.

She outlines why she thinks Shakes-peare and art generally should be “accessible for everyone. All art is political and you have to embrace that, be proud of it and take responsibility for what we mean when we put on a piece of art. It may be good, it may be bad but you have to know what you are trying to say.”

She desperately wishes there was something like the RSC in India. “That would be a dream for me,” she sighs.
She is at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, talking in the lunch break before rehearsals and the evening’s performance in front of a full house.

She is wonderfully eloquent and her voice is soft and expressive, which is why she has been sought out for
everything from Shakespeare to soap, radio and musicals. 

To mark William Shakespeare’s 400th death anniversary, the current production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will begin and end in Stratford-upon-Avon, but in between tour 12 cities. In what’s seen as a radical experiment, in each city six actors from a local theatrical group will perform the roles of the “Rude Mechanicals” who put on a play within a play. Meanwhile, Ayesha’s “fairy train” will be made up of 10 children, aged seven to 12, from a local school. “Some of the children are tiny,” whispers Ayesha, who is herself 5’ 1¾”.

She is 38 now with nearly three decades of acting behind her but “I remember I started working when I was eight and so feel affinity with kids that age”.

By the time the experiment ends on July 16, the RSC’s 16 professional actors will have worked with 14 amateur companies and 58 groups of local schoolchildren over a five-month period. This explains why the RSC has called the production “A Play for the Nation”.

All this also means that Ayesha is engaged in a never ending process of rehearsals so that the children, who have been practising in their own classrooms, don’t freeze when they appear on the real stage.

“I am a workaholic,” admits Ayesha. “I am literally working every hour God sent. And I love it because we are working with local amateur groups and with local children. And every two shows we have a new group of 10 schoolchildren. They are part of my entourage.”

Many are from deprived homes where they have never been taken to a play by their parents. It is only because of their “heroic teachers” that they have now done so.

The RSC could have marked the 400th anniversary by touring a production consisting of big name stars “and nobody would have batted an eyelid. They did not have to spend seven years on developing relationships with
amateur companies and local schools in 12 cities across the country. This is why I am loving working for the RSC,” reasons Ayesha.

The RSC has certainly been very political with its casting. In Canterbury, for example, in her moment of enchantment, Ayesha’s Titania had to fall in love with a female Bottom, the first in the drama group’s history.

The RSC has also led the way in casting blacks and Asians in roles previously considered the preserve of white actors.

“The RSC as an organisation has been one of the few and the first to reach out and cast people of colour,” she states. “When we did Othello with two black men it changed the race dynamic between those two characters. We weren’t colour blind — it was a conscious choice (by the RSC).”

Her own Titania has received warm reviews from the critics.  “Ayesha Dharker is luscious as the Fairy Queen,” enthused Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail.

The London Evening Standard said: “Ayesha Dharker and Chu Omambala make a seductive centrepiece of Titania and Oberon …. The nation is in for a treat.”

The Guardian observed: “There are two lovely moments towards the end: in one, the tension between Ayesha Dharker’s sexy Titania and Chu Omambala’s brooding, regretful Oberon dissipates and they are reconciled with tenderness.”

The children, in their school uniforms, emerge on stage daubed in the colours of Holi. The Indian touches are all there in the play, assures Ayesha.

For example, the initial disagreement between Oberon and Titania is over whether she is lavishing too much attention on a baby and not on him.

Titania cites the lines about how the baby came into her possession: “His mother was a votaress of my order:/ And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,/ Full often hath she gossip’d by my side.”

She draws attention to the coincidences in her life and how certain roles came her way.

“I don’t believe in networking,” she declares. “There is a lack of control if you are an actor. I feel incredibly lucky to have done any of this stuff, to have worked with people like Shabana Azmi (on the City of Joy).”

“I was 12 (when filming began) — I turned 13 on that job,” she recalls. “I am desperate to go back to Calcutta. I want to go to Flurys in Park Street and I want to go to the Blue Fox.”

Perhaps it all began when she was four, “not much older than (my daughter) Ava — I had a comic book version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I immediately fell in love with Demetrius Lysander”. She slipped into the bathroom and cut off her hair so she could look like him.

Another obsession was with Arabian Nights (which she did for the RSC in 2009). The family lived in Mumbai but summers were spent in England since her mother, Imtiaz, is a British national who grew up in Scotland.

“Ayesha must have been about 11 when I took her to Stratford and we saw Mark Rylance in Hamlet,” confides Imtiaz. “She was awestruck — I think it was life-changing for her.”

The realisation of what she wanted to do came after Santosh Sivan, moved by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, made The Terrorist in 1998 about a young woman brainwashed into contemplating becoming a suicide bomber.

“It was the film that made me realise there is a space for the kind of work that I want to do in this industry,” she says. “If the only option available to me was Bollywood, I would not be an actress. And not because I don’t like Bollywood but I feel there are enough people doing it and that’s not my area of interest. I love real stories or old stories or magical stories and I have had the incredible fortune to have done all three.”

When she played Emilia in the RSC’s Othello last year, she would stand backstage and listen to Iago’s speech that “he that filches from me my good name... makes me poor indeed”.

Ayesha never knew her paternal grandfather, Chandrakant Dharker, who died when her father, Anil Dharker, was a teenager, but “I had always heard that whenever he was trying out a fountain pen he would doodle a few lines from Othello. The fact my granddad loved those words made me feel I got to know him a little better — with Shakespeare you can literally talk across time.”

After being in Broadway with Bombay Dreams in 2004, “I was very, very seduced by New York”, and considered
settling in the Big Apple. However, the architect Charles Correa put her off with, “You can’t live there, you can’t live there, Ayesha.”

In 2008, when she acted in Britain’s longest running soap, Coronation Street, which has a huge hold on the British imagination, people confused Ayesha with her screen persona, Tara Mandal, girlfriend of Dev, a rough diamond. Even a Catholic priest came running up to her and told her, she “should not be going out with Dev”. “The bizarre thing about soaps is that people talk to you as if you are that character. They are very taken in by it,” she says.

She moved to London in 2010 after marriage, having previously been based in Mumbai.  “You don’t choose who you fall in love with and I fell in love with a British boy (Robert Taylor) and ended up having a British baby,” she laughs.

Today, while she is on tour, Robert visits with Ava. “Her bedtime story for the past year has had to be how
Titania meets Bottom and she will play all the parts — she will be Bottom, she will be Puck, she will be me, she will be all sorts.”

Highlights of Ayesha Dharker’s glittering and versatile career

Born: Mumbai, March 16, 1978

Parents: Father Anil Dharker, journalist; mother Imtiaz Dharker, poet

1989: Makes her debut, aged nine, when filming begins for François Villiers’ Manika: Une Vie Plus Tard (Manika, The Girl Who Lived Twice), while a pupil at J.B. Petit School for Girls in Mumbai.

1992: At the age of 12 played Shabana Azmi’s daughter in City of Joy, based on Dominique Lapierre’s novel and shot on location in Calcutta. Is taken on by Shabana’s agent in the UK.

1998: Played would-be suicide bomber, Malli, in Santosh Sivan’s Tamil film, The Terrorist, which greatly impressed John Malkovich and was a given glowing review by famed critic Roger Ebert.

2002: Cast as Queen Jamillia, the Queen of Naboo, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. It was a tiny part but it gave her a global profile.

2002: Cast as “Bollywood actress Rani” in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams. Ayesha added to the US cast when the musical moved to Broadway in 2004.

2002: Played Lata in BBC Radio 4’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

2008: Cast as Solana Mercurio in Dr Who episode, Planet of the Ood, on BBC TV. This science fiction series began in 1963 and is now a global phenomenon with millions of fans (the first series director was, incidentally, an Indian fresh out of Cambridge — Waris Hussein).

2008: Played Tara Mandal, girlfriend of Devendra (Dev) Alahan (Jimmi Harkishin) in ITV’s Coronation Street. The soap, which started in 1960 and once had 20 million viewers, still draws five million to seven million.

2009: Cast as Shahrazad in RSC’s Arabian Nights.

2010:  Moved to the UK from Mumbai after marrying Robert Taylor, director of vitamins company Vitabiotics; the couple have a daughter, Ava, aged three.

2010: Played Kamini Sharma, wife of Dr Prem Sharma (Sanjeev Bhasker), in 15 episodes of the BBC comedy drama, The Indian Doctor, set in a mining village in Wales. Serial repeated in April 2016.

2015: Played Emilia in the RSC’s production of Othello, directed by Iqbal Khan, at Stratford-upon-Avon.

2016: Cast as Titania, Queen of Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by the RSC’s deputy artistic director, Erica Whyman. The play, which will return to Stratford-upon-Avon, is currently touring Newcastle, Glasgow, Blackpool, Bradford, Canterbury, Norwich, Nottingham, Truro, London, Cardiff and Belfast.

Favourite books: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie; The Glass Palace and The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh; Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Ayesha, an avid reader, has just finished The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and is currently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

Favourite films: Rebecca; Casablanca; Some Like It Hot; Cinema Paradiso; Blade Runner and Pakeezah