A Hip-Hop Catfight in High Park; The Lone Open-Air Dose of Shakespeare is a Slapdash Midsummer Night's Dream

a midsummer night’s dream
Canadian Stage: Shakespeare in High Park
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The Dream in High Park, presented annually by CanStage, is the dean of our alfresco Shakespeare theatres. It's a responsibility that weighs unusually heavy this summer, owing to the disappearance of the local competition. Shakespeare in the Rough has suspended operations, ShakespeareWorks seems to have died of shame, and Oakville's Festival of Classics has had its plug pulled. Barrie's Theatre by the Bay and Newmarket's Resurgence Company are both mounting programs devoid of Shakespeare, unless you count Resurgence's inclusion of a one-man Hamlet already seen elsewhere. The painful part of all this is that most of these organizations have in recent years maintained higher standards than high-profile High Park, where a populist policy too often translates into a slapdash product.

That's what we get this year with A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by ahdri zhina mandela. It's been puffed as a Caribana or hip-hop Dream, but that's just noisy topdressing; what's underneath is formless and anonymous, dependent on the individual actors' highly variable skills. For all its popularity -- this is the sixth Dream in High Park since the whole thing started in 1983 -- is an appallingly difficult play whose three worlds of lovers, fairies and clowns have a habit of wandering aimlessly off in their own directions. This is especially likely in an open-air show where the absence of lighting, at least for the first half of an evening, tends to flatten everything out. The Dream is usually thought of as the ultimate pastorale, but if those scholars are right who think that it was first written as a kind of nuptial cabaret, it could be one of the few Shakespeare plays that was meant to be played indoors.

I sometimes pray to get to the end of just one year without having to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This, of course, means I'm jaded. The better part of me believes that A Midsummer Night's Dream is as great a play as ever was written, and every so often that better part gets fortified by productions that serve it up whole, fresh and alive. Kate Lynch's all-female interpretation at Theatre Passe Muraille was one, Miles Potter's conventional but consistently intelligent version in Oakville another, and David Ferry's uproarious staging last year in Newmarket a third.

The best of the current High Park performances is in fact inherited from that third show. This is Maev Beaty's Helena, an earnest beanpole (she carries a yoga-mat around and executes a sun-salute in her first soliloquy), careering like a weather-vane from self-abasing to self-righteous and throwing her heart and soul into both extremes. Holly Lewis's Hermia, a miniature termagant, is an effective foil for her, and the two of them put up a good cat fight. Their male counterparts go, as usual, for less: Richard Harte is a vigorous Demetrius but Antonio Cayonne, a first-time actor, brings from his other life as an oral poet a trick of trying Lysander's lines out in different word-orders before hitting on the right one. ("The course of true love never did run smooth" is subjected to especially prolonged torture.) This elaborate speech-impediment may be the dumbest comic idea a Shakespeare production has ever come up with. The one thing you don't want to do in these plays is stop the language in its tracks.

This production, in its different departments and in various modes, does it all the time. The fairies are just pushy, right down to the singing girl-group of Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed, intoning their lines in chorus while destroying their sense. Kevin Hanchard's Oberon does make sense, but it's a crabbed, ungiving kind of sense, aiming possibly at sinister but getting off at morose. Karen Robinson, an excellent dramatic actress but not exactly light of touch, is a monstrously coy and overbearing Titania. She does better as her mortal doppelganger, Hippolyta, progressively asserting herself over Hanchard's Theseus to the extent of pinching some of his best lines. Maybe it's a blow for feminism.

And so, perhaps, is the transformation of two of the hard-handed men who put on the play of Pyramus and Thisbe into hard-handed women. It totally disregards, of course, the fact that male camaraderie has a different tonality from male-female and that the scenes are written the first way. It also makes nonsense of Francis Flute the bellows-mender (still male) being cast as Thisbe; why would he be, when there are real women available? The mechanicals' rehearsal scenes are as juiceless as I have ever known them. Their actual performance begins with a rap treatment of the prologue, which is at least ear-catching, but it runs out of ideas afterwards. Steven Gallagher's Peter Quince, played as a young and earnest amateur director, is moderately delightful, but Matthew Kabwe's Bottom is short on personality and shorter still on humour, resulting in a sizeable portion of the play getting lost in the woods. There is a tail attached to Bottom's bottom in his transformation scene--a first, I think--but he hasn't been granted much of an ass's head, maybe because no mortal headpiece could compete with some of the things that seem to be growing out of the fairies' skulls, especially Oberon's.

Sarah Dodd's Moonshine has a nice moment when she loses it and seems about to attack the spectators with her lantern; she doubles as Egeus, whom she tries very hard to make funny, maybe to make up for a lack of laughs elsewhere. Whatever, turning Hermia's father into Hermia's mother makes hay of the play's sexual politics; the point, well brought out in the Lynch production, is that she's oppressed by men.

Cut to the end: Colin Heath, a formidably acrobatic Puck who's also been acting agreeably, has to deliver his valediction -- an actor-audience moment if ever there was one -- surrounded by the rest of the cast screeching and cavorting. It's the show's crowning moment of tone-deafness.