This amateur Bottom just can’t be beaten!
HERE is pro-am theatre: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has come up with the neat idea of casting amateur actors to play the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After all, in the play that is exactly what they are. Bottom and Co, with their dreams of glory, their stage fright and their improvisation in the face of disaster, are the patron saints of am-dram throughout the world.
The honours during the Stratford run of this Shakespeare 400th celebratory production are being shared by two local troupes. On the night I went, it was Wyre Forest’s The Nonentities Society which was playing Quince, Snout, Starveling, Flute, Snug and the great Bottom.
They were terrific. In fact, they acted the professionals off the stage. The Nonentities are alternating with the Bear Pit Theatre Company. When the show goes on the road, local amateurs from each town will star.
When I saw it, Bottom was being played by Chris Clarke, 54, a freelance drama teacher. His Bottom was nicely Midlands, funny yet not overdone. He could have done with a better ass’s head, mind you.
Alex Powell’s Flute and Andrew Bingham’s Snug and Simon Hawkins’s Snout also had the audience roaring. Great stuff.
Nor is that the limit of the community involvement. Local schoolchildren are used as Titania’s ‘fairy train’, singing and dancing. The stage becomes a tad crowded, but the principle of public involvement is admirable and rather touching.
To see the pride and delight on the faces of those amateur players as they took their well- deserved curtain calls was a fine thing.
DIRECTOR Erica Whyman’s contributions are more patchy. The show could do with more romanticism. Puck ( Lucy Ellinson) irritates. She is done up in an Artful Dodger top hat and distracts from her verse with too many grimaces.
The young lovers, hardly glamorous, lack chemistry — although Laura Riseborough’s Helena catches the eye with her comic timing. Older lovebirds Theseus and Hippolyta, plus Titania and Oberon, are scarcely more convincing.
Should the Dream not be a cat’s cradle of plausible attractions? Chu Omambala, playing Oberon, falls short of RSC standards of diction, but Ayesha Dharker is luscious as the fairy queen.
We can also enter, in the plus column, Sam Kenyon’s funky, jazzy music and a spry cameo from Jon Trenchard as Philostrate, the court flunky who is appalled when the duke chooses to be entertained by Bottom and his friends.
There will be more exotic Dreams (the forest here is suggested by a few long, thin, measly poles, lit red). There will be sexier, courtlier, edgier and more traditional Dreams.
Yet few productions will match the frisson when real amateurs step on this major stage and hurl themselves at a chance they will remember for life.
Shakespeare the theatrical would have loved that.