A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Overview

The sweaty drum of summer is beating out the last days of spring, bringing with it an exciting line-up of live music and theatrical events. Ushering in the silly season is B Sharp's reimagining of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Shakespeare that is a perennial summer favourite amongst al fresco theatre companies. Not one for the obvious, director Eamon Flack and his creative team are filling Belvoir Downstairs with a fresh production that renders the famous text down to its gorgeous essence. Beyond the fairies and immense trees lit with pinks and blues, is an ageless tale of chaos, innocence, debauchery, naivety and first love.

A major issue when reworking a classic is the debate over what is essential to the text and what are dressings for a specific, contextualised audience.

"[Shakespeare] was writing for a verbally literate audience so everything had to be said or it didn’t exist," says Flack, "We’re not like that today — we read image and subtext, we don’t like it when everything is spelt out." Midsummer is filled with especially thorny weeds, as it was written for a wedding and contains very personal in-jokes that would be completely lost on a modern audience. "Anything we couldn't hear in the heat of the moment, or anything that didn't further advance the action and meaning of our production we just got rid of," Flack notes, before adding: "It’s ok. Shakespeare was a theatre animal, he’d understand."

What remains is a high energy, often chaotic performance that captures the spirit of Australian summers. "We [think that we] are a good and innocent people," says Flack, "therefore we deserve the pleasures of our lives, therefore we can have as much pleasure as we can get, therefore pain and excess matter less than pleasure, therefore we get wounded, therefore the world is our enemy, therefore we are good and innocent. It’s terribly naive, but it's also beautiful to watch unfold."

It is in this unfolding that Shakespeare introduced two of the most famous farcical situations in English theatre: the four lovers led astray by fairy magic and Bottom, the greatest ham actor of his age, donning the image of a jackass and copulating with the Queen of the Fairies. As a creative twist, Bottom and Puck — the master craftsman of this mischief — are performed by the same actor, Charlie Garber, who moved from the Sydney fringe troika Pig Island to the mainstage with Gethsemane earlier this year.

For Flack, Puck and Bottom represent the opposing styles of wisdom that drive the play: "the wisdom of chaos and cynicism and insight on the one hand, and the wisdom of normalisation and ordinariness and a Homer Simpson-like being absolutely yourself on the other." This pairing of opposites is joined by a number of equally cheeky cast doublings throughout the production. "It sets up this brilliant echo of the play's own theatrical playfulness," Flack muses, "[where] all those great Midsummer questions of identity and shadow, light/dark, day/night get played out directly."

One of the challenges faced by Flack and his cast was how to present Midsummer without ignoring its place as one of the most watched and known of Shakespeare's plays. Flack's solution was "to take something else really familiar — the great pop love songs of the last few decades — and by putting the play and the songs together you necessarily need to reinvent them both." But it's not just pop songs that have been introduced into the mix; these love tunes are sung with the "self-directed try-hardiness" of that great summer pastime, karaoke. "There's great comedy in that idea," says Flack, "taking what is fundamentally an impossible performance task really seriously".

The beauty of this honest comedy, springing not from fairyland but out of the efforts of normal, often naive, humans is further enhanced by the humble set design. Very humble, actually. "If you’re going to put it on in a small theatre you may as well make it really small – so we’ve built a stage in the downstairs space," says Flack, admitting that "I’ve been deeply unsatisfied by the aesthetic and spectacle of pretty much every [Midsummer] production I’ve ever seen." Rather than woo the audience with superhuman acrobatics and sumptuous costume design, Flack and designer Alistair Watts have taken this production back to its historical roots with a stage denuded of extravagance.

"But," Flack cheekily suggests, "just because it’s a small theatre doesn’t rule out the potential for spectacle...".

To win one of two double passes to A Midsummer Night's Dream, email your name and
address to hello@concreteplayground.com.au