Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Peter Sellars
Stratford Festival, Masonic Concert Hall, Stratford
July 24-September 20, 2014
Hermia: “He hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!” (Act I)
This year Stratford has done something it has never done before – it is mounting two productions of the same play in the same season. The play is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the directorial approaches could not be more different. Chris Abraham’s provocative production treats the play as a comedy and sets it in a backyard in Stratford, Ontario, in the present where part of the wedding reception after a same-sex marriage is a production of Dream as performed by the two grooms’ friends. World-famous American director Peter Sellars’ provocative production treats the play as a drama of existential angst set in no definable location where four actors perform all the roles in the play. The production that better captures the spirit of Shakespeare’s play as most people know it is clearly Abraham’s. The production that deliberately subverts the spirit of Shakespeare’s play as most people know it is Sellars’.
Sellars’ production is clearly meant to be experimental and is certainly not meant for everybody. That’s one reason why it is being staged in the Masonic Concert Hall that seats only 149 people. If you go to see it, you do not go to see Shakespeare’s play but Sellars’ vision of it. In judging an experimental production the first question is whether it enlightens the text in any way and the second is whether it’s vision is compelling. With Sellars’ Dream the answer to the first question is both yes and no; the answer to the second is no.
The four actors in Sellars’ version are Dion Johnstone, Sarah Afful, Trish Lindström and Mike Nadajewski. Sellars has apportioned their roles thus: Johnstone plays Theseus, Lysander, the Indian Boy and Bottom/Pyramus; Afful plays Hippolyta, Helena, Puck and Flute/Thisbe; Lindström plays Titania and Hermia and Snout/Wall; and Nadajewski plays Demetrius, Oberon, Peter Quince and Starveling/Moon. Since Sellars has directed the actors not to distinguish among the roles in any way, it seems he thinks each of the roles applies to only one type of character. The four do exactly as they have been told. It’s just too bad they have been restricted in such a perverse way.
In Sellars’ view the play examines only one situation – that in which two couples, Lindström and Nadajewski, Afful and Johnstone – discover an affair between two of their partners. Sellars has racially colour-coded the situation to make it “easy” (socially dubious as that may be) to see who “belongs” with whom. Lindström and Nadajewski are a white couple and Afful and Johnstone are a black couple. The affair is between Lindström and Johnstone which translates into their various roles as Lysander and Hermia, Bottom and Titania. During “Pyramus and Thisbe”, Lindström becomes the Wall that separates them, as her character in other roles had separated the two black characters.
The one benefit Sellars’ interpretation brings is to emphasize just how unkind and hurtful the things are that are said between Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and Titania and among the four lovers. Theseus just has conquered the Amazons and taken their queen Hippolyta as his wife. Oberon and Titania’s quarrel over the Indian Boy is so great it has disturbed the course of the seasons. And Helena loves Lysander who loves Hermia who was promised in marriage to Demetrius. Helena tells Demetrius: “The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: / Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me”. Lysander says to Hermia: “Out, loathed medicine! hated potion, hence!” Taken out of the context of comedy, as Sellars does, these characters’ lines are not funny at all but filled with anger and hatred and despair. If anything, Sellars shows what a mistake most productions make in not revealing the weight of pain and confusion in these lines.
Yet, as much as it is interesting to hear how angrily the characters of this comedy speak to each other, Sellars’ approach causes two problems. The first is that Sellars has had the actors speak all their lines in exactly the same angry manner no matter which role they are playing so that there is no differentiation in delivery among the actors or by one actor among his or her various roles. This leads to our having to listen to an hour and 45 minutes of the same angst-ridden tone no matter who is speaking or who they are playing. Having heard all of these actors in other plays, this uniformity of tone is clearly intentional. The result, of course, is that after a few minutes the same tone, no matter how tortured, becomes boring.
To make matters worse, Sellars has had the actors miked to allow them to speak at the kind of subconversational volume level that has become fashionable in movies of late. You don’t have to strain to hear the actors, but because of the distancing effect of amplification you do sometimes have to look about to see who is actually speaking. Given that the actors switch from role to role doing absolutely nothing to indicate the change and given that the four actors all speak in exactly the same manner, only audience members who know the play well will be able to follow what is happening.
The second problem with Sellars approach is that he tries to include the mechanicals in with the lords, fairy rulers and lovers. The result is so ridiculous that one wonders whether some sort of monomania is at work rather than a form of directorial insight. Imagine, for example, Bottom saying this line in an angstful fury suppressing any attempt at humour: “a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to look to 't”. Well, that’s what Sellars has Johnstone do. Imagine Starveling as the Moon in “Pyramus and Thisbe” speak this line in exactly the same way: “All that I have to say, is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog”. The effect is ludicrous so that many in the audience were laughing not because the scene was humorous but because the directed line-reading was so bonkers. Never before, have I thought hat Puck’s song, “Up and down, up and down, / I will lead them up and down: / I am fear'd in field and town: / Goblin, lead them up and down” was meant to spoken, as Afful does, with a tone of existential doom.
Sellars allows no cues in the text to dissuade him from projecting this single tone of anxious struggle. He even tries to turn Bottom’s errors in word usage into profundities, as in “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, ... what my dream was”, where Sellars has Johnstone speak the words as if Bottom has experienced some sort of profound synesthesia rather than merely using the wrong words in his confusion.
To make “Pyramus and Thisbe” function as a true tragedy rather than as a comic travesty of one, Sellars ignores the fact that the lines are written in doggerel and excises all the comments of Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers that makes fun of it. Therefore, Sellars has Nadajewski speak Peter Quince’s prologue (“If we offend it is with our good will”) in the same tortured voice he has used throughout, but then Sellars has to cut the mocking comments from Theseus, Lysander and Hippolyta to allow Quince to maintain his tone of dread as he continues his prologue with “Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show”.
Sellars keeps the play sealed in its own airless world even at the very end when Puck delivers what is normally his address to the audience. Instead of speaking the lines, “If we shadows have offended” to us, Sellars has Afful literally turn her back on the audience to speak them to the other three actors. The second last line, “Give me your hands, if we be friends”, which normally refers to applause, Sellars construes as Puck/Helena/Flute asking the other to hold hands as if they were all finally to make up in one minute for all the recriminations they had been hurling at each other for the past hour and 45 minutes.
Lost during the action is how the central conflict is resolved that was caused by Lindström and her avatars falling in love with Johnstone and his. It seems that Lindström like Titania is cured of her love by seeing that she has fallen in love with Bottom as an ass. Why this should cure Bottom of his love is totally unclear. Sellars’ racial casting of the two couples now takes on connotations which one certainly hopes he did not intend. His reimagining of Dream looks unfortunately very like a parable defending anti-miscegenation since peace is only restored when the two white actors and the two black actors pair up as couples again.
The entire interior of the Masonic Concert Hall has been turned into an art installation by Abigail DeVille. The ceiling is covered in a vault of foil below which are suspended all manner of objects from stacking chairs and floor-lamps to pieces of wood and other found objects. It looks like an explosion in a junk shop caught in mid-flight. What his has to do with Sellars interpretation is totally unclear unless he thinks of Shakespeare’s text is a load of old junk that he has exploded.
The Masonic Concert Hall has a small, shallow proscenium stage which lighting designer James F. Ingalls has surrounded with hidden LED lighting panels. Throughout the action the panels cast different hues onto the stage and actors but there seemed to be no link between colour and emotion except that red appeared when the exchanges were filled with more hatred and terror than usual. During the majority of the first two-thirds of the show, Ingalls has the lighting levels so low that often it is hard to see the actors at all.
At the same time sound designer Tareke Ortiz has created a soundtrack of waves breaking on a beach that continues throughout the action. It stops only twice when the word “silence” happens to appear and then it gradually recommences. Other sounds like the repetition of faraway trumpets or a barely discerned pop song are mixed in. At various times the soundtrack suddenly erupts into a loud crash, drowning out the words and then subsides. Given the acting done at the same level of apparent anguish, given the lighting kept at such low levels, given a soundtrack of lulling waves no matter what the characters are doing or saying, the combined effect is distinctly soporific. One almost suspects that Ortiz’s periodic crashes are to wake us up. Sellars seems to be taking Pucks words, “Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here” rather too literally.
At one point in the action, all four actors turn to the back wall and scratch the fingernails repeated down its surface. Even though one of the soundtrack’s crashes covers up the sound, the scene has the same effect of setting one’s teeth on edge. That, indeed, would appear to be the entire point of Sellers’ production. Sellars claims that his version with four actors will find the “structural clarity” in the play. In fact it does just the opposite. Perhaps that’s why people were exiting at a steady rate throughout the show. Since Stratford is offering two productions of Dream this season, there’s no question which you should see. See the one in the Festival Theatre that views the play as a comedy and celebration of diversity, not as a hellish monotony of unending angst.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Mike Nadajewski and Trish Lindström; Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindström and Mike Nadajewski; Trish Lindström, Dion Johnstone, Mike Nadajewski and Sarah Afful. ©2014 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2014-08-23
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play