When London’s legendary Globe Theatre asked Atul Kumar to stage Twelfth Night, he immediately saw it full of song and dance and the vibrant folk colours of India—a change for the veteran actor-director, considering he’d never worked with live music before. A Hamlet cast with clowns speaking gibberish, yes. But never a musical.

“I can’t sing to save my life and suddenly I was surrounded by these singers and dancers and composers, and it started rolling in that direction,” Kumar tells the Straight from his home in Mumbai, before the resulting show, Piya Behrupiya, hits Diwali Fest here. (Although his company has already headed to North America for the tour, he’s stayed behind because his wife is due to have a baby.)

The Company Theatre’s Piya Behrupiya is a rollicking Hindi translation—notably, not an adaptation—of Shakespeare’s tale of love and mistaken identity. It will be shown here, as it was at the Globe in 2012 and then elsewhere around the world, with English surtitles. It is, you could say, Bard by way of Bollywood, although Kumar clarifies: “The term Bollywood is a very tricky term, associated with things kitschy and not high art.”

Kumar actually draws more from the Indian folk theatre that has inspired Bollywood. “But it is Bollywood as well,” Kumar, who is also the Company’s artistic director, admits with a small laugh. “We love Bollywood. We have grown up watching those crappy films.”

It’s not so much that his production messes with the script—the story is largely the same—but that it translates it into largely colloquial Hindi, “twice removed” from the original Shakespearean, as he puts it. Lord Orsino still gets cross-dressed Viola to plead his case to Olivia. And the household servants still wage war against their arrogant boss, Malvolio.

But Kumal clearly enjoys upending the classics, telling the Straight that when he studied the works of Shakespeare in theatre school, they never spoke to him. It was only when he started seeing the works reinterpreted around the world—in Japan, Korea, France, Russia, and, of course, in diverse ways within India—that he found them more interesting. “We started liking him more when we made him our own,” he says, then explains wryly: “For the last many years in India I’m known for being a bit blasphemous. I’ve done Shakespeare without words, or I take extremely popular writers in India and turn them upside down.”

With works like these, the Company Theatre has made a name as one of the most innovative troupes in India, where Kumar is pleased to now run an artist residency, just outside Mumbai (largely funded by the money from his Globe gig). But there are challenges, of course.

“More than 90 percent of our theatre companies are struggling to survive here because we don’t have support from the government and corporations. And for a country known more for its culture than anything else, it’s pitiful,” Kumar laments, but then quickly adds: “I have no vehemence toward the government, because it is a country that allows a great freedom of expression.”

The Company Theatre’s expression speaks far beyond India’s borders these days, its unique cultural crossover of Hindi Shakespeare holding appeal far beyond expat audiences. “We just performed in Chicago, and the audience was 70 percent non-Asian, and we got standing ovations,” Kumar says.

Piya Behrupiya runs from Tuesday (October 11) to October 22 at the York Theatre as part of Diwali Fest.