Stratford Beacon Herald, June 02, 2004
Dream in the rainforest
By: Donal O'Connor
The Stratford Festival opened its 2004 season last night with a version of A Midsummer Night�s Dream planted firmly in the Amazonian rain forest.
The device allows director Leon Rubin to run riot with colour, spectacular staging and eerie sound effects as the citified characters in Shakespeare�s play about confused love enter a magical forest world controlled by fairy spirits.
In presenting this Dream, Mr. Rubin has drawn on the talents of designer John Pennoyer and choreographer Donna Feore. Together they have created a highly animated stage world that seems authentic, unpredictable and dangerous � complete with bungee-jumping trapeze artists performing high above the theatre�s jungle floor.
The staging is uncluttered, the central fixture being a triple-tiered perch of twisted green metal extending over and around the Festival Theatre balcony. Bands of white fabric that drop down, quickly transform the �jungle� into the court of Duke Theseus when needed.
The director has also called upon some of the actors he so successfully directed last season in his exceptionally well-staged Pericles, including Jonathan Goad, Thom Marriott, Donald Carrier and Nazneen Contractor.
Mr. Goad�s Oberon (he also plays Theseus) is a suitably benign King of Fairies, seemingly content in keenly observing the outcome of his initial plan of revenge against his wife Titania, with whom he has had a falling out. As Theseus, he seems a compassionate Duke, ready to let love have its course and set things straight among the two pairs of young lovers � Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander.
Michelle Giroux does an admirable job of playing Helena. Appearing first as a gangling school girl in pursuit of Demetrius, she is no slouch in the comic department as she portrays Helena as Demetrius�s doting puppy and continues to pursue him despite his fervent protests.
Indeed, comedy is in full flower in this production of Dream and it seems Mr. Rubin and his actors have thoroughly mined the text for its comic nuggets � and then some.
There�s amusement to be had in rock star mimicry and even in cellphones in this production.
As lovers become lost in the forest and magic potions and fairies have their sway over the mortals, the comic possibilities appear to multiply. Suffice to say here that Haysam Kadri as Demetrius and Jeffrey Wetsch as Lysander are up to it. Hermia, meanwhile, played by Ms. Contractor, proves a feisty rival to Helena when the two men strangely become enamoured of her former confidante.
Still, the funny business among the lovers is but one dimension of this classic comedy. The other comic business has to do with the Mechanicals, that rag-tag bunch of amateur actors chosen to perform on the occasion of the nuptial ceremony that eventually joins the two sets of young lovers as well as Theseus and Hippolyta, the latter played by Dana Green who also plays Titania.
Given a significant place in Shakespeare�s play, the buffoonery of the Mechanicals has been known to wear thin in some productions to the point of threatening to derail the play. Not so in this presentation.
Thanks to a virtuoso comic performance by Thom Marriott as Nick Bottom (Pyramus in the play-within-the-play) one is hard-pressed to recall so hilarious a performance of the part. The same may be said of Don Carrier�s Peter Quince who comes across as a manic director with all the wrong moves.
The two characters are ably complemented by Brendan Averett�s Francis Flute, Robert King�s Snug, Shane Carty�s Robin Starveling and Anthony Malarky�s Tom Snout. You�re not likely to see a more amusing portrayal of these bumbling, self-conscious fellows.
Nicholas Van Burek, meanwhile, brings a well-measured malice and element of darkness to Puck, Oberon�s supernatural messenger � a malice accentuated in this production by a savage appearance and crouching, animalistic demeanor.
If there�s an element in the play that is eclipsed by the comedy and spectacular staging, it�s the erotic. Surprisingly, for all the naked appearance of the fairies and the bewitching of Titania under the influence of aphrodisiac flower petals, the usual sensuousness associated with the play isn�t there. Titania�s doting over Nick Bottom transformed into an Ass is played entirely for laughs, giving that juncture of the play a quite different feel.
Mr. Rubin has clearly decided A Midsummer Night�s Dream is intended as comic entertainment and that emerges as the dominant feature in this production. And something significant, it seems to me, has been lost. Setting the production in our contemporary world with the South American rain forest allowing for a journey into a co-existing spirit world fits remarkably well, let it be said, with the Bard�s text written in the 1590s.
The play continues in repertory at the Festival Theatre to the end of October.