A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Shakespeare set A Midsummer Night's Dream in a wood near Athens. Leon Rubin, director of this year's opening show at Stratford, sets it in what the program assures us is an Amazonian rain forest, full of trailing tendrils and inhabited by fiends bearing fronds. There is no reason why these two visions should conflict.

Shakespeare was no literalist, certainly not in this play, and calling the characters Athenians obliges nobody to dress them up in tunics. Rubin, though, seems to think there's a problem. He tries to solve it by cutting all specific mentions of the place out of the play. This is a mistake on several levels, and it comes near to sinking an otherwise buoyant occasion.

For one thing, he has to keep coming up with verbal substitutions, and keeping track of these becomes a distracting kind of game. In the text, when Oberon, king of the fairies, instructs his servant Puck to throw love- juice in a young mortal's eyes, he tells him to identify the man "by the Athenian garments he hath on." Here his clothes become "civilian garments," leaving you to wonder just who, in Oberon's mind, might qualify as a civilian. (Somebody urban? Not a soldier? Not a fairy?) Athens itself becomes simply "the city" which sounds unhappily generic. The specific is always better than the general, and the name "Athens" comes with legendary associations that are important to the play. Much is lost by the changes and nothing gained; and that's not even counting the occasions on which they muck up the verse. In this play, even more than in its author's others, metre matters.

And another thing: Bottom the weaver is no longer a weaver. Nor do any of his fellow performers in the artisans' interlude of “Pyramus and Thisbe” retain their trades. Doubtless Shakespeare chose these somewhat arbitrarily (bellows-mending must have been a specialized trade, even in Elizabethan England) but they help give the characters an identity, both as individuals and as parts of a society. Here they could be anyone. Indeed, their first entrance suggests they might even be professional thesps, down on their luck and glad of a gig. By the last scene, that's cleared up; they are, indeed, "hard-handed men who work in -- um, the city --here." All the more reason, then, for us to know what they work at.

All of which is a shame, because there's some beautiful stuff going on here. There are trapezes for the fairies to swing from, though these are not used -- as they were in the famous Peter Brook production a generation ago -- as metaphors for the characters' magical powers. The acrobatics here are far more intrepid, using the whole vertiginous height of the Festival stage, but they aren't organic; they function as discrete production numbers.

Down among the mortals, there is plenty of nimble character- development. Theseus and Hippolyta start the play with a formal tango, which suggests passion held severely in check -- on her part, anyway. The relationship is sustained, though it doesn't hold when, as is customary, the duellists morph into being Oberon and Titania.

The actors simply have to start over. (This, admittedly, has been the case in every production I've seen that has tried it.) For all that, Jonathan Goad's performance of the twin monarchs is a notable achievement, in deft control of every mood and every nuance. His lady, Dana Green, doesn't have the same degree of authority or finesse, but she does pretty well.

The young lovers held my jaded attention from first to last, which is a feat. Shepherded by heavy- father Egeus (Brad Rudy, humorously illuminating a really rotten role) they immediately show welcome signs of diversity.

Suck-up Demetrius (Jeffrey Wetsch) has put on a jacket for the occasion; heart-throb Lysander (Haysam Kadri) ostentatiously hasn't. They tend to merge as the evening goes on, but that's unavoidable. Helena (Michelle Giroux) is, delightfully, a besotted teenager, trying out faithful-dog poses, and also a uniformed and prissily conscientious student. "She was a vixen when she went to school" says this Helena in a revelatory new reading, intimating that her rival Hermia is a drop-out and probably a slut.

This indeed is how Nazneen Contractor, in her first scene, seems to be playing her, which makes her later emphatic protection of her virginity hard to credit. We all know the play's about sex, and any production that finds it necessary to break up a single line with four separate spasms of heavy breathing is surely working too hard at underlining the obvious. Still, the quartet's awakening, having learned their respective erotic lessons, is done with rare conviction and is the most moving sequence in the play.

Bottom's awakening is very fine, too, and Thom Marriott's whole performance a treat. He makes little of his transformation scenes, possibly inhibited by a skeletal ass-head that obscures him without actually disguising him. But as the obsessed amateur actor -- big, fresh-faced and not a man to mess with -- he is superb. He is perfectly good natured; he merely knows, deep in his being, that what's best for Bottom is best for the play; and he could well be right. The actual “Pyramus-and-Thisbe” show is among the funniest I have seen, irradiated by this Pyramus' total belief in himself and his part: He really is a good actor, whatever his audience may think.

Among his fellows, Donald Carrier makes a studious Peter Quince, younger than most and seduced, to his own annoyance, into mispronouncing "Ninny's tomb" just like everybody else; and I really loved Snout (Anthony Malarky), formerly the tinker, and the only one I have seen to be overcome with bashful pleasure when addressed as "sweet and lovely Wall."

Nicholas Van Burek supplies a stolidly mischievous Puck, rather lacking in charm. This makes the play's ending cooler than I suspect was intended. It's hard, in fact, to detect any overall vision behind the production; it goes in for quick-fix solutions, and its pleasures have to be taken as they come. This may be the price of severing the play from its roots.

Shakespeare wrote two Athenian plays, and both of them are in Stratford's opening bill. I hereby serve notice that if, at the appointed time, I find myself confronted by something called “Timon of the City”, I shall require some very serious explanation.