The Globe and Mail, June 03, 2004
Rumble in the jungle
By: Kamal Al-Solaylee
Although one of Shakespeare's most popular and frequently staged plays, it's occasionally hard not to agree with Samuel Pepys's 1662 assessment of A Midsummer Night's Dream as the "most insipid, ridiculous play" he's ever seen. The Bard may have been a genius with words as this play proves, but original plotting wasn't one of his talents.
Replace "play" with "production" and Pepys comes close to describing what opened Tuesday at the Stratford Festival. Under Leon Rubin's sufficiently brisk but still-muddled direction, an easy-to-appease play becomes a desperate-to-please production, taking populism to its extreme conclusions and back to where Pepys started us off: the ridiculous and the insipid.
To be fair to Rubin, it's the nature, and some may argue the curse, of A Midsummer Night's Dream's seemingly discordant worlds of royal courts, young lovers, fairies and thespian "mechanicals" that calls for a pronounced directorial concept. Most productions I've seen of Dream have elevated a lassoing concept at the expense of the text, and this one is no exception.
The theme is contemporary Latin America with the Amazon rain forest replacing Shakespeare's crowded wood. As Theseus (Jonathan Goad) and Hippolyta (Dana Green) sway to the tango, they're surrounded by bespectacled guards that hint at a despotic police state.
Any hopes for a politicized reading are raised and dashed in a flash. Enter the young lovers, taking their cues from the contemporary North American idiom of white-rapper Eminem (Jeffrey Wetsch's Lysander) and white-trash Britney Spears -- in both her jailbait schoolgirl outfit of Helena (Michelle Giroux) or in her call-girl wardrobe selection (Nazneen Contractor's Hermia). Demitrius (Haysam Kadri) is preppy and suitably fastidious.
The hints of despotism in Theseus's court carry over to the rain forest where the underused Goad and the now captivating Green transform to Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of a world of fairies, an indigenous but endangered native population. The relationship between Oberon and Puck (a lamentably miscast Nicolas Van Burek) further probes the possibility of a tyrant-slave dynamic. It's the only dark undercurrent this otherwise sunny-side-up production serves. (For the record, this is one of the festival's "Family Experience," shows and viewed strictly as such, it has youth appeal and youthful exuberance.)
As for the "mechanicals," or Teatro Mecanico, the impression is either of some wandering vagabonds or English expatriates. Either way, both Bottom (Thom Marriott) and Peter Quince (Donald Carrier) emerge as the production's most solidly comic performances.
What struck me most about the production as a whole is the extent to which Rubin has encouraged slapstick, physical humour that comes from outside the text. (Is this an echo of what he and designer John Pennoyer described in their program notes as utilizing the "space above the stage"?) Do they not have enough faith in Shakespeare's words?
Apparently not. This Dream is packed to the brim with visual ticks and gags -- some like Bottom's laugh are endearing and others like Demetrius's cellphone ringing on-stage simply cheap shots -- that in effect become the play itself. Step aside, Shakespeare and language. Welcome, Laurel and Hardy and comic routines.
As the predominately young cast hurl themselves on-stage or jump up and down the twisted green pipes that symbolize the forest set, the production never pauses to allow us to enjoy either the poetry or the wisdom of what Shakespeare has to say about "the course of true love" and human folly.
How can it when there's a whole Cirque du Soleil sideshow to accommodate? The trapezing and bungee-jumping of the fairies may be an homage to the pageantry and spectacle of the play's Elizabethan roots, but in fact point to a more fundamental problem.
Rapturously executed as they may be under Donna Feore's choreography, Michael J. Whitfield's lighting design and the colour-saturated palate of Pennoyer, these scenes are not as well integrated as they should be, serving merely as a bit of razzle-dazzle. Peter Brook's legendary 1970 production of Dream examined the limits of theatricality; Rubin's takes on the circus as a metaphor. Not what I would call a fair trade.
Furthermore, in a play already overflowing with the adrenaline of its young cast -- Giroux's Helena is exceptionally well played and spoken, and there's promise in Contractor, Wetsch and Kadri yet -- the acrobatics, like the production as a whole, fail to cast the desired spell, at least on an adult who wants more out of his theatre trip than an unscheduled stop at the circus.