Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by David Grindley
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
August 21-October 30, 2009
"’The fierce vexation of a dream’"
Stratford’s last production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was only five years ago. That one, incongruously set in a rainforest, was directed by Leon Rubin and is generally referred to as the “bungee-jumping ‘Dream’”, since bouncing fairies are what caught most people’s attention. This year’s “Dream” will probably be known, somewhat incorrectly, as the “punk rock ‘Dream’” because of its loopy design.
At least British director David Grindley and designer Jonathan Fensome have decided to place the action on the bare Festival stage and have reinstated the balcony missing for several seasons. But that’s about all that is positive. As soon as the initial scenes in Athens are over the balcony comes crashing down on the stage bending up boards where its point impacted the floor. Until we return to Theseus’s court, that, somehow, represents the forest where the lovers escape and where the mechanicals rehearse their play. Why the ruined Festival stage represents that magical world is anybody’s guess unless Grindley and Fensome are making a nasty comment about how Shakespeare has fared there recently. Besides being boring to look at for two hours and in no way even suggesting a forest as its upright pillars might have done, the fallen structure covers up the sweet spot centre stage and forces Grindley to block the action around its perimeter. Actors often climb into the downward-pointing apex and climb up the side of the vee, but it always seems more as if Grindley is trying to use the structure than that it is a natural part of the landscape.
Fensome’s costuming is also peculiar. The Athenians are dressed as if it were the late 1950s, in fact, about the time the Stratford Festival was founded. The fairies, however, are dressed in black leather, with ultra-think-soled boots, torn net stockings, with tattoos, piercings and hair moussed into odd shapes. The first question is: “Why do the fairies look like punks and goths from the 1990s instead of the bikers and their girls from the 1950s?” The fairies are always held to represent an older culture that mortals have forgotten, not one from the future. Second, “How do these urban ‘bad‘ kids, whether from the 1950s or the 1990s, in any way reflect the forces of nature?” Every one of the lines they speak, so overflowing with quaint horticultural and entomological references, is totally incongruous coming from a group whose only encounter with natural being might be the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle or a smashed fly on the windscreen.
It’s true that the dissension between Oberon and Titania over possession of the Indian boy has caused chaos in nature. Grindley acknowledges this through the profusion of autumn leaves on the stage. The fairies themselves represent order and healing. That’s why they bless the Theseus’s household at the end of the play. That’s why the confusions in the forest actually sort out the lovers‘ difficulties. Puck’s mischievousness has a purpose even he can’t see. Oberon wants to end his rift with Titania to restore order in nature. Thus, to costume the fairies as troublemakers and adolescent rebels against order, is completely contrary to the sense of the play.
Compounding the problems with the design are peculiarities in direction. According to the text the lovers‘ flight through the forest causes their clothing to be torn by twigs and brambles. Grindley does have fairies pick at the lovers’ clothing as they pass by, but they lose most of their clothing through wilful unmotivated. Bruce Godfree’s Lysander suddenly takes off everything but his underwear. Ian Lake’s Demetrius decides to take off his pants with his shoes still on. Why? It all looks like a cheap bid for laughs. The asses head for Bottom consists of Puck’s two pointy shoes for ears and some fake teeth. Is that all the magic he can muster? It looks stupid and leaves the resourecless Puck barefoot.
If the acting were uniformly fine it might be possible to ignore some of the production’s peculiarities, but, unfortunately, it is not. The best performance comes from Geraint Wyn Davies as Bottom, one of the most nuanced performances of that role I’ve seen. Too many actors play this character at such a high pitch from the start that he seems more a caricature than a character. Here, Wyn Davies makes him a believable human being, an enthusiast but not the usual raging egomaniac. His use of a lovely Welsh accent helps soften all his lines and with it Bottom’s personality. He’s not an idiot but a naïf. One of Grindley’s most unusual ploys is to have Bottom play Pyramus’s speech over Thisbe’s bloodied scarf in total earnestness so that it actually becomes moving. After all, the mechanicals thinks it so, so why shouldn’t we experience it that way? Grindley treats Thisbe’s speech over Pyramus the same way. Grindley here at least follows Theseus's view of the mechanicals‘ play that “never anything can be amiss, When simpleness and duty tender it”.
Dion Johnstone and Yanna McIntosh make an excellent Oberon and Titania, both exuding power and sensuality. It would be nice not to have the distractions of Johnstone 1980s’ Michael Jackson haircut and McIntosh’s off-kilter Amy Winehouse do. Tom Rooney’s Puck is a problem. Looking cool in his shades and skinny-legged pants, he plays him as an insolent punk with attitude. One could easily believe he is Oberon’s equal, not his servant, and indeed, the Grindley’s deliberately de-emphasizes the hierarchical order of the fairy world that mirrors that of the humans.
Timothy D. Stickney delivers all of Theseus’s lines in the same shout. Cara Ricketts’ Hippolyta, won by pistol not by the sword, is appropriately sullen in the first scenes of the play, but unaccountably comfortable with her new life, and even affectionate, even though only one day has passed. This is all the more unbelievable since Grindley begins the play with Theseus shooting a couple of Hippolyta’s comrades point bank. Of the lovers Laura Condlln as Hermia gives the best performance. She is the clearest-spoken and the only one to find humour in her character rather than in her stage business. Bruce Godfree is probably next best as Lysander, but Ian Lake is a dull Demetrius and Sophia Walker an unmodulated Helena.
All the mechanicals are all good--Michael Spencer-Davis as Peter Quince), Skye Brandon as Flute, André Sills as Snug, Kevin Hanchard as Starveling and Victor Ertmanis as Snout. John Innes is also very effective as Egeus, Hermia’s strict father.
Given Grindley’s murky interpretation, it is probably appropriate that lighting designer Michael Walton should cast the stage in a thick gloom, unchanging and unrelieved until the sun suddenly rises as a kind of afterthought at the end of Act 4. The audience at the matinee I attended greeted the curtain call with a loud ovation, apparently because the rock ‘n‘ roll of the fairies had triumphed over the crooner music favoured by the mortals. If the play were about one triumphing over another, the applause might be justified. The play, however, is about the harmony of both and it is doubly depressing that in dumbing down the play, Grindley ignored this essential point and that the audience did not notice.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Yanna McIntosh and Dion Johnstone. ©David Hou.
2009-09-07
A Midsummer Night’s Dream