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</b><b>A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by William Shakespeare, directed by Leon Rubin
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 1-October 31, 2004
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“The Fairies from Brazil”
Far too often at Stratford when directors take on Shakespeare they ask not “How can I make the text clear?” but “How can I gussy it up?” That’s exactly the case with Leon Rubin’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that opened Stratford’s 2004 season. Rubin has chosen to relocate the action to a setting that makes nonsense of text and loaded it with gags to aim it at a teenaged audience.
Instead of Athens and its nearby woods, Rubin has chosen a city in modern Brazil and the Amazonian rainforest. Rubin writes in his programme note that because there aren’t any uncharted forests in Europe anymore, “the vastness and other-worldliness of the South American rainforests is similar to what Shakespeare envisioned.” Yes, but only if you pay no attention to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s woods with its “hillocks”, “hawthorn” and “dewdrops” is hardly a deadly jungle. It is where two pairs of young lovers choose to meet and where a troupe of amateur actors choose to rehearse. To choose to meet in a woods we can imagine, but in a jungle?--I think not.
More important, crucial to understanding the meaning of the play is the change of seasons. Just note the title. The dissension between Oberon and Titania has caused chaos in the natural world so that the seasons no longer follow their natural course. Given that the Amazonian rainforest is equatorial, it has no seasons. Besides that, Titania’s speech puts the blame for nature’s destruction on its own inhabitants. That works for a symbolic “woods” but not for the ecopolitics of a rainforest.
Adding to this foolishness, Rubin and designer John Pennoyer have related Shakespeare’s fairies to the native people of the forest through the use of tribal paint. They clearly make Theseus and his court inhabitants of a modern city. The rainforest setting forces symbolism of the play’s ending where the fairies bless the house of Theseus to go terribly awry. Man and nature end in harmony in Shakespeare’s play. “City” and “rainforest”, however, are concepts we know are not in harmony, so and ending that claims that they are strikes us as either false or foolishly naïve. The production becomes insulting when Rubin shows us the indigenous fairies getting drunk on the six-pack of Bavaria beer snout has lugged into the forest.
Rubin has thus chosen a concept but not thought through its implications. But then he has not thought through the play very deeply in any case. Over and over it is not Shakespeare’s lines that get a laugh, but added stage business--slapstick, funny voices, funny poses, modern intrusions. During Pyramus’ speech in the mechanicals’ play, a cellphone goes off. The audience looks around, but the cellphone belongs to Demetrius. That, nothing by Shakespeare, gets the biggest laugh of the evening. Puck leads off a troupe of fairies to the military call back of “I don’t know but I’ve been told.” Bottom does rock star kicks while playing his air guitar. Stratford has denied that it is “dumbing down” Shakespeare’s plays. Yet, the amount of added stage business of this sort only proves that it is.
The acting is generally unimpressive. All of the actors speak their words clearly, but they give little sense that they understand what they are saying. If they did, they wouldn’t chop up Shakespeare’s clauses and phrases with so many ill-placed pauses.
Jonathan Goad, who plays both Theseus and Oberon, and Dana Green, who plays both Hippolyta and Titania, do nothing, not even using gesture or intonation, to distinguish their supernatural from their human roles. It’s hard to know what Nicolas Van Burek is doing as Puck. He speaks with so much emphasis and effort that one might think he was attempting a crude imitation of a mentally challenged person, that is until the epilogue when he returns to normal speech.
We first meet the Helena of Michelle Giroux as a nerdy schoolgirl, but after that that characterization completely vanishes. Neither Nazneen Contractor nor Jeffrey Wetsch as Lysander speak well enough to be convincing, leaving only Haysam Kadri, whose Demetrius is a kind of uptight boy scout, as the only one of the four who speaks well and stays in character.
Overall, the mechanicals are more fully individualized. Donald Carrier is fussbudget Peter Quince, though he doesn’t know how to speak Quince’s speech before the court so that we know what Quince is doing wrong. Rubin has had a good idea in casting a large guy, Brendan Averett, as Flute, rather than the usual shrimp. This makes Flute-as-Thisbe even funnier as does Averett’s skill in having Flute attempt to imitate high class femininity. The star of the show is Thom Marriott’s Bottom, a cocky macho guy in love with his own voice. His death scene in slow motion as Pyramus is hilarious, but he unaccountably throws away Bottom’s key speech when he awakes without the ass’s head.
Pennoyer’s costumes for the fairies, bodystockings evoking both the animal and plant kingdoms, are colourful and high imaginative. His costumes for the mortals are less consistent. Theseus and Hippolyta, king and queen, dress no differently than those they rule. If we are in Brazil, why do Theseus, Hippolyta and Egeus hunt in Asian, Russian and British costumes? If we are in Brazil, why does Theseus have a zebra rug on his floor and why do he and Hippolyta wear Chinese-style kimonos to watch the mechanicals’ play?
Rubin tries to conjure up the rainforest canopy through the use of four bungee trapeze artists. It’s fun the first time, though all you think is “Cirque du Soleil” and not “rainforest”. In fact, you wish he had junked the whole Amazon idea and chosen to make the woods a circus. Donna Feore’s choreography is exciting in the tango that begins the show, but becomes increasingly hectic and unfocussed as the show proceeds, especially in the final celebration when it has to compete with bungee trapeze artists bobbing down from above. Lighting designer Michael Whitfield has come up with a surprising range of effects from coloured lights that seem to burst into bloom on the stage to the retro psychedelics for the court’s final celebration.
Amid all the acrobatics and pratfalls what’s lost is any sense of magic, wonder, sexual tension or reconciliation. By encumbering the play with a nonsensical concept and distracting additions, Rubin has achieved the difficult task of making one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays unengaging. All colour and noise without content turns laughter to yawns.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Jonathan Goad as Oberon and Dana Green as Titania. ©2004 Michael Cooper.
<b>2004-06-02</b>
<b>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</b>