Toronto Sun, June 03, 2004
Lost in a Dream
By: John Coulbourn
There is much to like in Leon Rubin's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a production that launched the Stratford Festival's 2004 season Tuesday night.
Not a lot of it has much to do with William Shakespeare, unfortunately, but there is nonetheless much to like.
For openers, there's designer John Pennoyer's concept, anchoring the vast majority of this Dream in a rain forest. Well, one might label it a South American (or at least Latin American) rain forest, on the basis of the tango that launches the evening, but that tango takes place on a very African zebra skin, so we'll just call it a rain forest.
Wherever it's located, it has given Pennoyer a stunning pallete with which to work, particularly in the fairy world ruled by Titania and Oberon, played respectively by Jonathan Goad and a lacklustre Dana Green, doubling in the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta.
Led by Nicolas Van Burek's faceless Puck and arrayed in barely-there snippets of spandex, fur and glitter, these fairies are wondrous to behold, for all that they are too anchored in an indigenous world that meshes less than comfortably with Shakespeare's highly literate and very European text.
Still, if you throw in some sleight of hand and top it up with some trapeze work worthy of Cirque du Soleil, chances are no one will notice. That is, unless the audience is bored with the four young lovers at the heart of the tale, which is the case here. Michelle Giroux, Nazneen Contractor, Jeffrey Wetsch and Haysam Kadri are so caught up in laboured declamation that they seem to have forgotten they are playing lovesick fools.
This leaves the evening in the hands of the Mechanicals, a bunch of rubes led by Thom Marriott's Nick Bottom, who together tackle the ancient story of Pyramus and Thisbe with great comic effect. That effect seems more rooted in the tradition of the Three Stooges than it does the Bard of Avon, however. But, hey, the cell phone gets a good laugh.
Last season, Rubin and Pennoyer collaborated on a tremendously impressive staging of Pericles, which never got the audience it deserved.
This season, one suspects, their collaboration on the Dream is likely to be much more of a crowd pleaser. So, ironically, they still won't get the audience they deserve.