Posted by quinn
on August 25, 2009, 5:25 pm, in reply to "Dream Reviews"
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Dream missing magic
The comedy in A Midsummer Night's Dream can turn on a dime and become a nightmare instead
By JOHN COULBOURN
AT STRATFORD -- For a director and cast, it can be a dream of a play -- the kind of play upon which virtually any artistic vision can be visited without harming the heart and soul Shakespeare has hidden so artfully at its very core.
But if they go too far -- if they forget for even a moment that even a play like this makes a few very basic demands on those who would stage it -- A Midsummer Night's Dream can turn on a dime and become a nightmare instead.
All of which accounts for both the limited success and the major failure of Shakespeare's comedy in the Stratford Festival production that opened in the Festival Theatre Friday.
In bringing the work to the stage in his Stratford debut, director David Grindley does a lot of things right, despite a shaky beginning certain to have anyone who survived the Fest's production of Macbeth this season convinced that by play's end, somebody is going to be done in with a garden implement.
Turns out the shots are simply Grindley's way of underlining the fact that Hippolyta's wedding (Hippolyta is played by Cara Ricketts) to Theseus, the duke of Athens, (played by Timothy D. Stickney) is somewhat of a shotgun affair, for all that the entire play pivots around it.
Working on a more or less clean stage, with a cast arrayed in a sort of '50s chic by designer Jonathan Fensom, Grindley loses little time in establishing the basis of the rest of the story -- the tragi-comic romance between lovely young Hermia (Sophia Walker) and the young swain Lysander (Bruce Godfree), seemingly doomed by Hermia's father who has promised her to Demetrius (Ian Lake) who would sooner wed her than Helena (Laura Condlin) who loves him to distraction nonetheless.
Soon, our four star-crossed lovers have repaired to the forest, where they are caught up in a feud between Oberon, the King of the Fairies (played by Dion Johnstone) and his lovely wife, Titania (Yanna McIntosh).
In a parallel plot, a group of loyal if none-too-bright Athenians rehearsing a play in celebration of the ducal nuptials is also caught up in the web of enchantment when they run afoul of the feckless Puck, Oberon's henchman, (played by Tom Rooney) who transforms their leading man (Geraint Wyn Davies) into an ass.
In the main, it's a good cast, and on occasion they do some good work, despite the fact that in transferring the action to Arden, designer Fensom tips more than his hand, thus turning the stage into a bit of an obstacle course for his '50s lovers and his post-punk fairies, all of them dankly lit by Michael Walton.
In fact, Wyn Davies comes close to stealing the show, almost turning the love stories into the play-around-the-play by slyly turning the celebrated play-within-a-play into a romp, despite the best efforts of the four young lovers and Stickney's commanding Duke.
But in the end, Grindley forgets the things upon which a successful production of A Midsummer Night's Dream ultimately will rise or fall.
One can forgive him for the fact that this gloomy production with all its falling leaves speaks more of fall than summer.
One can even overlook the fact that it often seems as much nightmare as dream, filled as it with a cast that could pass as easily for ogres and gnomes as for fairies and little people, thanks to Fensom's design and Walton's lighting.
But even the most forgiving audience will have trouble overlooking the fact that this show is devoid not only of the kind of theatrical magic needed to bring it to life, but of the poetry, the textual clarity and the passion that would make it soar as well.
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