First- rate acting in Shakespeare Festival’s Midsummer Night’s Dream but hold the hijinks
Shakespearean comedy a little hyperactive
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theatre: Freewill Shakespeare Festival Directed by: Marianne Copithorne Starring: John Kirkpatrick, Belinda Cornish, Kevin Corey, John Ullyatt, Kristi Hansen, Bobbi Goddard, Sheldon Elter, Jesse Gervais Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park Running: through July 21 (odd dates and matinees), alternating with King Lear Tickets: Tix on the Square (780420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) After a quarter century of vivid, accessible outdoor Shakespeare, it’s a measure of the extreme eccentricity of the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s silver anniversary edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that it’s bookended by loud people who aren’t in the play.
Someone is getting an earful from someone else, who’s yelling incomprehensibly in a thick, possibly Italian, accent, as they run pell-mell down the aisles toward the stage. “Don’t be an ass, go home to your wife!” yells someone else. These people enter the Dream and become its characters, who discover, in an enchanted wood by moonlight, that love, along with theatre, is a many-muddled thing.
In the romantic early evening dusk of a lush river park — that was Edmonton, amazingly, on Thursday’s opening night — a Duke (John Kirkpatrick) invokes “the pert and nimble spirit of mirth” for the wedding entertainment he’s drumming up for his bride (Belinda Cornish). Pert? Maybe. Nimble? No question.
Nearly everything about Marianne Copithorne’s production, which experiments with transforming Shakespeare’s romantic fantasy into a farce, sees mirth almost exclusively in physical terms: high-energy, peppered with pratfalls, weighted to test the aerobic endurance of its cast. Ironically, the only aspect of the show that’s attentive to language is the amateur play put on by a bunch of earnest and inept “rude mechanicals” dominated by a bossy weaver (John Ullyatt) with thesp pretensions who magnanimously offers to play all the parts. In Ullyatt’s genuinely funny and endearing performance, Bottom, preparing to be the doomed Pyramus, rolls the language around, tries fracturing phrases and running words together in unexpected combinations of breaths and stops, like Ian McKellen warming up for Richard III. His cast-mates, droll in their seriousness, are impressed.
Elsewhere, though, despite a first-rate cast who apply themselves to comic invention with all the physical expertise at their command, Dream as non-stop hijinks grows wearisome. If the performance style is designed to give you a sense of love as an absurdly interchangeable obsession, it does that. But after a night of permutations in the woods, you may find you don’t much care which lover ends up with which or nobody, and that’s less satisfying.
It’s the travails of the homespun Pyramus and Thisbe coop, from the first read-through their opening night, that not only make you laugh but stay with you, and make you smile from the heart, too. Competing with the most reliably hilarious sequence in the English theatre using pratfalls seems, in the end, like a mistake.
The conception at work is certainly original. Kevin Corey’s Puck, for example, who magically “invents” the fairies out of the mortal clay, is no airy sprite, Freudian or otherwise, in the service of the fairy king Oberon (Kirkpatrick). This is the first time I’ve seen the “merry wanderer of the night” as a gravel-voiced bum-scratcher — a swaggering good ol’ boy who picks his nose, guffaws, and sprawls like a guy ordering two-anda-juice in a bar. How he ended up working for an employer as flamboyantly Mardi Gras as Kirkpatrick’s Oberon is something you can wonder on the way home.
Like Cornish, an imperious and charming Titania, Kirkpatrick is a wonderfully wellspoken and intelligible actor. It is, therefore, a striking, and possibly counter-productive, departure that Oberon opts to show his mortal origins by chewing the play’s most lusciously beautiful speech “I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,” like a man with serious allergies to the outdoors.
Similarly, Cory Sincennes’s design is a deliberately resistant choice for an outdoor Dream. With the backdrop of the park and its foliage at its disposal, it is, instead, a solid concrete-coloured wall, and the multi-level playing service in front of it is dotted with a few outsized, frankly fake purple lollipop “trees.” Is this a comic allusion to Wall, amusingly played by Snout the tinker (Nathan Cuckow) in the play-within-a-play? Maybe. On the other hand, Matthew Skopyk’s score, a cunning blend of otherworldly effects and comic interventions, has a whiff of magic about it.
The young lover roles are taken on by four excellent actors. As Helena, the girl who never gets the guy who becomes the girl who gets two guys, Kristi Hansen fine-tunes incredulity and exasperation. And her counterpart, Bobbi Goddard’s Hermia negotiates a blend of those two qualities, as well. Jesse Gervais and Sheldon Elter bring their natural comic exuberance to bear on the two leading men. But in the ceaseless farce of leaps and jumps, punches and knockabout — Puck has them literally knock themselves out — that’s the fabric of their excursion into the woods, none gets much chance to convey a sense of wonder or self-discovery in love. There’s no time for sighs.
The only character who brings a sense of watchful stillness to the proceedings is Atom Cornish Meer; she’s the shih tzu playing the “tiny changeling pup” who’s a source of dissension between the fairy monarchs.
“So quick bright things come to confusion,” says one of the leading men at one point in the romantic mix-up. So will you.