A Midsummer Night’s Dream
THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL
The National Post

Chris Abraham's Stratford production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is an extraordinary mixture of magic and mishap. It takes place, in a disciplined way, all over the Festival theatre. The idea is that the play is being performed as part of a modern wedding celebration, an updating of what some scholars believe to have been the circumstances for which the Dream was first created. The party is apparently being held in someone's capacious backyard; the lights and the greenery extend off the stage and along the aisles of the auditorium.

Julie Fox has designed this beautifully and Michael Walton has lit it wonderfully. As the characters from the play's different worlds clash and intermingle, I really felt, more perhaps than in any other Dream I have seen, that I was in an enchanted wood.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments..." says Scott Wentworth, master of the nuptial ceremonies, accurately quoting his author if not the text of this particular play. The wedding at which he's officiating is a gay one; groom and groom having taken their vows, our host suggests the performance of a play. Various suggestions are thrown out (including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a cheeky choice on several levels) but they settle, of course, on A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play that they apparently all know by heart, or at least can memorize in record time; they are obviously not, like Snug the joiner, slow of study. Well, it makes as much sense as the jailbirds of Man of La Mancha imbibing the story of Don Quixote through osmosis.

Wentworth himself moves naturally into the role of Theseus; Maev Beaty is his Hippolyta, and theirs are the best performances of these roles I have ever seen. The production abjures the now customary doubling of their roles with those of Oberon and Titania, but it still makes a better case than any other for the development of their relationship from mistrust to acceptance. He is affable, worried, trying to erase their positions of conqueror and conquered; she gives an ironic edge to the talk of "our solemnities," an edge that remains even as she believably thaws. (References to Hercules, a past lover, have a notable recuperative effect.) He thinks through the famous speech about the lunatic, the lover and the poet so that it becomes the key to the play. The only flaw in this duo is Hippolyta's getting coarsely drunk in the last scene, thereby negating her sympathetic responses to the “Pyramus and Thisbe” show. It's uncertain whether it's the character who's had several drops too much or the wedding guest playing her, and that doesn't help.

Their fairy counterparts are fine, too. Jonathan Goad, released from his rut of swashbuckling roles, is a darkling Oberon, well-disposed toward the human lovers though not above using his invisibility to play practical jokes on them, but a terror to his own kind. He doesn't have much rapport with Chick Reid's Puck (a production fault) and gets tyrannically angry with his queen (a production strength). Titania, in the cross-gendered shape of Evan Buliung (he and Goad alternate the roles), is gracious, sensual, and unusually strong in her horrified reaction when she discovers that she has loved an ass (the donkey kind). The lesser tinier fairies are all played by children, but delightfully.

Titania played as a woman by a man, Puck played by a woman as - well, who knows about Puck? - are minor outgrowths of the gay marriage scenario. The major one comes in the quartet of young lovers. The reason that Hermia is refused permission to marry Lysander is that this Lysander is a woman, though the production's emphasis on this seems to vary according to how many lines about her being a man it thinks it can get away with. Anyway, Tara Rosling plays the role well, and shares with Bethany Jillard's Hermia some powerful moments of dread as they make plans for their elopement through the woods. It's balanced by the end of the foursome's ordeal, fear giving way to joy and wonder, with Mike Shara's Demetrius, previously a devastatingly self-approving stud, giving especially touching signs of having grown up. It's the in-between scenes that are the problem. There are some amusing moments early in the woods, but the long quarrel scene, which really needs careful pacing, is interminable; the actors fall into streams and throw wedding cake in one another's faces, gags that aren't terribly funny the first time and become less so with each repetition. It's even harder than usual to follow who is doing what to whom, or why. Part of this is dynamics; Jillard is shrill, Liisa Repo-Martell plays Helena on a single note of fretful exasperation with repeated hand-gestures to match, and Lysander's sex- change turns the scene into - I can't find a more tactful description - a three-way cat-fight. No wonder Shara's outnumbered Demetrius comes off best. Egeus, Hermia's heavy father, is played as deaf, his lines and the replies to them being rendered in sign-language. This works surprisingly well; his tyranny (he wants to have his daughter honour-killed) is even scarier when delivered by an impersonal third party. The production misses a trick, though, by not having Bottom's "the wall is down that parted their fathers" delivered, and of course signed, in the reformed Egeus' general direction.

I've delayed mentioning Bottom and company because they're the weakest link. Their “Pyramus and Thisbe”, though much toyed up with props, is neither funny nor touching, because these rude mechanicals have never come to life as individuals. That includes Lally Cadeau's Quince, still called Peter but referred to once as "this lady." Six guys together have a different dynamic from five men and a woman; Shakespeare was smart enough to know this and to write accordingly. Like everyone else I'd looked forward to seeing Stephen Ouimette play Bottom, but he's miscast; he's a great actor of underdogs while Bottom's salient feature is his cheerful self- confidence. He's charming in his awakening speech but this, like Lear's awakening, is a scene in which no good actor can fail. There are a lot of pop songs interpolated; great at the start, wearying by the end. The production has already been praised to the skies and damned to the depths. Neither reaction is deserved.