A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.
Directed by Peter Evans. Julia Billington Associate
director. Jack Starkey-Gill Voice director. James Evans. Dramaturg Set and
Costume designer Teresa Negroponte. Benjamin Cisterne Lighting designer. Max Lyandvert
Composer and sound designer. Nigel Poulton Movement, intimacy and fight
director. Understudies Meredith Cohn and Tom Matthews. Bell Shakespeare. The
Playhouse. Canberra Theatre Centre. June 7-15 2024 Bookings: 62752700, canberratheatre,com.au
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| The cast of Bell Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream |
“The course of true love never
did run smooth.” Not so Peter Evans’s
fresh and streamlined production
of Shakespeare’s timeless comedy of mischief, myth , magic and mayhem. Bell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that brought audiences to their feet at
the opening of the Canberra Season owes its enthusiastic reception to a number
of inventions. Firstly, Evans has engaged a youthful and versatile ensemble to
double or treble up throughout Shakespeare’s three interwoven stories of love’s
confusions. Theseus (Richard Pyros) plays Duke Theseus and Oberon, King of the Fairies,
as well as the comical role of Flute, who plays Thisbe in the Mechanical’s play
about ill-fated love. Theseus’s bride to be Hippolyta takes on the roles of the
Fairies’ queen, Titania as well as giving a delightful performance as Quince,
the organizer of the Mechanicals,. Mike Howlett plays a rather dark and moody Demetrius,
promised to Hermia (Ahunim Abebe). He doubles as the Mechanical Snout, who is
given the role of Wall in the Mechanicals’ play. Abebe is cast as Snug, another
rustic worker and plays Lion in The Most
Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. Lysander, in
love with Hermia is played by Laurence Young, who also doubles as a Mechanical.
Natu Ngaropo plays Hermia’s intransigent
and autocratic father Egeus who demands
she marry Demetrius against her will.. In a commanding change of role, Ngaropo
is cast as the bombastic Nick Bottom, the weaver. Isabel Burton gives a
refreshingly alive portrayal of Helena, beset by her obsessive love for
Demetrius and also plays Mechanical Robin Starveling who is given the role of
Moonshine. Only Ella Prince plays the solitary role of Oberon’s spritely
messenger Puck, played with a certain morose cynicism in Evans’s production.
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| Imogen Sage as Titania. Richard Pyros as Oberon |
I mention this casting to highlight the vibrancy that this gives to Shakespeare’s timeless comedy of Love’s vagaries. It heightens the absurdity of predicament while retaining a distinctive and original clarity. This is helped by Shakespeare’s use of blank verse to distinguish the courtiers , rhyming couplets for the lovers and doggerel and prose for the rude Mechanicals. Shakespeare’s mastery of storytelling is well matched by this production’s skilful storytellers. Evans has also capitalized on his cast’s agility to tell the story through physical theatre, aided by Teresa Negraponte’s rustic barnyard setting of wooden slats with gaping windows through which the characters appear and disappear. It all serves the fluidity of a production that floats and glides, bounds and bustles with a physical dynamism that is fast and furious between the lovers in the woods as they struggle to grasp on to reality. Interestingly, the Mechanicals’ play within the play forsakes the customary slapstick business for a more controlled clownish comedy. Thisbe’s death is a delicious moment of comical grotesquery. Howlett’s Snout milks it to the deadly end.
What Evans’s use of a small ensemble to play the comedy’s parts means is that the play has been cut to accommodate the cast. Characters of Titania’s fairyworld who fawn on the grotesque form of Bottom with his ass’s head have been left out of the action. Ngaropo performs a human with an ass’s head. There is no braying of sexual delight from the mollycoddled Bottom. Also, in the absence of courtiers to comment on the play at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the critical responses to the Mechanicals’ amateur performance have been omitted. In its economy and directness, Bell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a production for our time. In her plea to the audience to pardon any likely offence, Puck is too well aware of the offence that could be caused by Shakespeare’s apparent flouting of the law, criticism of parental power, Oberon’s desire to have the changeling boy as a henchman or a slave and Titania’s enanourment of a beast. Perhaps this is why Evans has downplayed the fawning over Bottom. Even Max Lyandvert’s understated composition suggests a more mystical and sinister aspect to the action to contrast with the frantic actions of the tormented lovers.
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| Matu Ngaropo as Bottom |
Bell Shakespeare’s production of Shakespeare’s most popular play bursts with a lively originality and dynamic energy that not only makes it delightfully entertaining but also retains its power to offend and hold a mirror up to Nature that could make the course of true love run smooth.
Photos by Brett Boardman