Sydney Hills Shakespeare in the Park – Sport for Jove

Overview

You know those muggy, dusky nights in the height of summer when all you can hear is cicadas? The heat of the day's subsided but something about it lingers, and relief only sets in when the massive southerly that hits after dark raises goosebumps on your skin, and weirdly you find yourself reaching for a jumper.

Well, Sport for Jove are about to launch into their sixth season of outdoor summer theatre, with a double bill of magic and the spirit world that seizes that summer twilight feeling and runs with it, through the foreboding setting of the 200-year-old Bella Vista Farm.

Susanna Dowling directs Shakespeare's cautionary fairy story A Midsummer Night's Dream. The characters — young lovers and dreamers — enter a forest world between sleep and waking, on the shortest night of the year. The fragile bonds of family, friendship and love are broken, while the Fairy Kingdom is upended and entangled with the human world in a war over a mortal child.

And with Arthur Miller's parable of mass hysteria, The Crucible, director Damien Ryan creates a haunting site-specific production of the modern classic, entirely within the old farm shed. Drawing a parallel between the Salem witch hunt of 1692 and the McCarthyism griping the US in the '50s, this play is a timeless (and timely) reminder of the evils of ignorance, and the deadly combination of hatred and power.

If the season trailer's anything to go by, this will be some seriously edge-of-your-seat, immersive, electric-as-the-summer-evening-air theatre.