a midsummer night’s dream
theatre passe muraille
the national post

The new all-female production of A Midsummer Night's Dream begins appallingly. A canoe appears at the back of the stage and the seven ladies of the cast disembark, looking like Indians from a touring company of Peter Pan who have been spending far too much time with the Lost Boys. They perform war whoops and tribal dances of rather less than high-school accomplishment; the fact that two or three of Toronto's proven best actresses are up there cavorting makes it all the more embarrassing.

It seems they are meant to be Amazons, back from a raiding party; they even get to playing football with a few, presumably male, severed heads. Tiring of this, they decide to put on a play: the one that we have come to see. And from the moment they utter its first words, everything changes and the evening becomes a treat.

The spine of Shakespeare's Dream is the marriage, announced in the first scene and celebrated in the last, of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and the captured Amazonian queen Hippolyta. Many productions try to ginger this up by making Hippolyta very dubious about this arrangement, and it usually looks like uphill work, unsupported by the text. Here, however, we have in a built-in subtext: the play presented from the Amazons' point of view.

Whenever Theseus' name is mentioned, all the actors spit; in the world outside the play, he is their enemy. Waneta Storms as Hippolyta stands silent upon a rock, emanating stoic disapproval, while Diane Flacks as Theseus blusters around below. Their relationship retains its wit and edge right up to the close; and nothing seems to have been imposed.

Indeed, the wonder is just how smoothly the script accommodates an Amazonian (rather than feminist) interpretation. It is summed up in a tableau from the first scene: Kristen Thomson as the disputed Hermia stands, agitated, outside a knot of four men -- duke, father and two rival lovers -- who are presuming to decide her future. The general pattern is that men behave appallingly -- note the sadistic relish of Ruth Madoc-Jones' Egeus consigning his daughter to death or a convent, and the overweaning swagger of Karen Robinson's Demetrius -- while women who permit themselves to love them are very silly. Behold the relationship of Hermia and Helena (Catherine Fitch), rapt in reminiscence of their schoolgirl friendship before reverting to a competition in coyness, no holds barred and all claws bared.

Thomson's Hermia is the dominating performance from the moment she first flounces on, pouting and very much aware of her potential as a tragic heroine. She doubles as Bottom the weaver, in which she sometimes sounds like the two heroines of Absolutely Fabulous rolled into one. She seizes on the great amateur actor's ability to make every moment a performance, whether Bottom is improvising an apologia for the presence of a lion in Pyramus and Thisbe or bossing around his newly acquired retinue of fairies. Her handling of his awakening (one of the supreme moments in Shakespeare) suggests that, on their forays into the outside world, the Amazons acquired some crucial insights into the human condition.

In both her roles, Thomson overdoes some things, and she has a worrying tendency to repeat her effects: she is 10% infuriating and 90% irresistible. This has been, unquestionably, her year: by my reckoning she has played nine roles in four shows, one of which (I, Claudia) she wrote herself.

Kate Lynch's production is not only consistently funny, it is also consistently beautiful -- visually (Steve Lucas has designed a heavenly blue-drenched set, which he has lit magnificently) and verbally, a matter not so much of golden voices as of rigorously applied intelligence. Lynch must direct more Shakespeare; I found myself listening more intently than I have done at this play in decades, certainly more than at any Dream I have encountered at Stratford or in High Park. Storms and Flacks reverse their earthly royal genders to play Oberon and Titania; Storms' fairy king is wheedling, petulant but capable of grandeur, Flacks' Titania libidinous, capricious, but also tenderly protective. And when they confront the elements, they are majestic.

A few questions nagged at me toward the end. How would they manage all the instant doubling required of them in the final scene? They do it very smoothly and effectively. Whose is the offstage voice that keeps correcting the pronunciation of "Ninny's tomb"? (It sounds male. Maybe it's Shakespeare.) How would the Amazons deal with the insuperable fact that the play is a celebration of heterosexual marriage? The answer is that, despite a few continued naggings from Madoc-Jones' over-insistent Puck, they accept it, joyously. It seems that you can have your wedding cake and eat it, too.

That, of course, is inside the play. Outside it, they still have somehow to return to, and make sense of, their initial framework. They do it amazingly, though it would be unfair to reveal how. Let us just say that life holds out the unsettling possibility of imitating art. It crowns a superb production.