I saw "A Midsummer Night's Dream" last night at Bard on the Beach. It is such a lovely venue for theatre and the production was full of energy and colour . . . and raunchiness! The costumes were terrific -- kind of a mashup of farthingales and leather boots and bustles and flowing metallic see-through fabric. I loved all the fairies (Puck had this great Billy Idol kind of sneer and he wore a bright bustle-skirt but carried it off with real masculine vivacity) and the young lovers were great, especially Hermia (who was very crisp and gave you a sense of a volcanic kind of energy under tight control) and Lysander (who was a nice foil to Hermia -- more languid and fluid). The big fight scenes were terrific -- really physical and exciting and creative and all over the stage and full of intensity.
I liked the incursions into the audience -- Puck watched the rude mechanicals' rehearsal from a seat in the middle of the second row -- he climbed over people and plunked himself down, causing a little frisson among the audience members -- always fun for everyone, even the audience members who don't get to sit near him.
They achieved the forest with a bunch of different umbrellas, some were mesh that cast nice shadows like a gobbo would, and some opaque -- I didn't love that. I didn't like the tendency of some of the actors to use modern phrases in throw away lines. It doesn't fit if you're throwing stuff in, especially when you've already said it in the way you're acting (like when Bottom asked Philostrate what she was doing later -- we already knew they'd made a kind of connection).
I must say I really didn't like Bottom at all. Scott Bellis played him and he is a very talented actor, but he chose a kind of Austin Powers sort of persona with the clothes and the walk and the accent which I don't think worked at all. He had a very red nose (I guess because when Thisbe is crying over his dead body, she says "this cherry nose"? because I don't think there is any suggestion beyond that that Bottom is a drinker) and buck teeth (which, I guess, suggests the donkey and Austin Powers) and mutton chop face whiskers and he was just a buffoon. There was no soft side at all. My favourite speech ("I have had a dream - past the wit of man to say what dream it was . . .") was just lost. It meant nothing, because he really hadn't had an experience of magic and love and romance -- he was too much of an idiot to have an inkling of anything special except himself. I appreciate that Bottom is egotistical, but I think there is enough dimension in the character that he can have a sense of something greater than himself and the lost note that he can never recover. Shakespeare always gives us that -- something beyond the obvious.
For Bottom's transformation, they used a metal cage as his donkey head, which I hated. It reminded me of the movie, "1984", and the cage that has the rat inside and that made it have this horrible menacing quality, which really curtailed the sense of luxurious romance between Titania and Bottom.
And I didn't find the "play within the play" that hilarious. I liked Quince, Snug and Snout and their roles in the play but I felt like the others didn't catch their characters either as their actual character, nor as their role in the Pyramis and Thisbe play. There were parts that were funny, but it wasn't the laugh riot I think it should be.
But criticisms aside, it was great fun to see and also great fun to go with a couple of experienced MSND actors who had lots of great insights into the production (some of which I've used here), so thanks for thinking of me when you were planning your outing!
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