The near-to-first production I saw of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the legendary Peter Brook mounting of forty years ago that placed a smugly grand Alan Howard as Oberon on a trapeze. At the end, the cast burst into the auditorium and startled the audience with personal greetings everywhere and I got to shake hands with Puck. My prof at grad school protested that “this isn’t Shakespeare” but ever since, after many productions, I realize that the play’s potential for theatrical magic allows for a variety of directorial approaches that can, each one, conjure and realize the play’s otherworldly centre. And thus does the current Soulpepper production under Rick Roberts’ freshly imaginative direction that makes us as much participants within a compelling atmosphere, from which characters emerge, as witnesses to a consistently engaging play.
You’ll note that all but two of the speaking parts double as fairies –and sometimes trees- although, because of their hooded attire and Lorenzo Savoini’s seductively dark lighting, we never quite know who or what we are dealing with. Now and then, these large looming figures emerge with concertina, fiddles, bodhrans, and bells in hand and contribute to Mike Ross’s evocative and varying soundscape. The use of flashlights as travelling spots makes for many an eerie moment with misshapen, figures landing upon the lighting’s rich hues. Likewise, the text sometimes doubles as individually delivered phrases of sound within a sonic dream that includes a repeated motif here, an electronic crescendo there, finger tapping to suggest rain, and always a breathy undercurrent that creeps about the stage like a soft wind of undefined intention. As with a McLuhan medium of low definition, we have to fill in the goings on, sometimes with our own fears, and are compelled to be involved.
Among the actors, there are several who please a great deal. Mike Ross –yep, the sound designer- as Lysander and Brendan Wall as Demetrius are young men not quite out of boyhood who react to situations from an emotionally driven core, as much physically as in words, always with an inherent playfulness. They are dopey just enough to make them lovable. In comparison, Alena Malika and Karen Rae, as Hermia and Helena respectively, offer detailed and carefully shaped readings of the text, sometimes edged with emotional shadings that suggest individual personality, yet sometimes one senses a conceptual approach in which rhyme and form safely rule too much. But note Tatjana’s First Fairy who, with soft lilt in her voice, musically blends both earth and air in a brief, but enchanting, brew.
As Theseus and Hippolyta, Ins Choi and Trish Lindstrom concisely suggest presences of quiet unforced authority in both public places and in the bedroom. As a physically agile Oberon, Choi is not so much kingly as a short-fused and seething inner intensity awaiting a reason to burst, and sometimes the outbursts seem arbitrary. But just as Oberon easily gives in to rage, Lindstrom’s Titania very readily awakens to what seems an unrealized sexual freedom and we can tell, via her fawning and probing caresses of Bottom’s body, that this is one ass who turns her on. This Titania, who earlier fell asleep as if suspended in air, exudes an insistent sensuality. Both pairings of Choi and Lindstrom offer revelations, as does Gregory Prest’s Puck, a menacing realization of theatre’s favourite gofer who, here, implies a secret life and a not-too-concealed mean streak. And his last words are very threatening indeed.
As one would hope, the tradesmen-players round off the disconcerting elements in both play and production with a guileless, clueless innocence that allays the worldly and metaphysical sharp edges that one can easily find herein. In something contrary to expectation, Oliver Dennis is a more inward Bottom whose socially rough edges show some grace, while Michael Hanrahan’s Quince is less bookish than I have seen, pragmatic and gruff and slightly prissy. Their play is indeed the thing, genuinely hilarious with a prancing, breast-baring Thisbe of Michael Simpson, who gets off on feeling up Wall and the crotch underneath, and a self-indulgently oratorical Pyramus who bellows, wails and sobs way over the top. His suicide with not less than five knives and a well-positioned phallic sword is eye-watering funny. Go see, go enjoy, for there is magic in this Soulpepper production.