A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Canadian Stage - Shakespeare in High Park
The National Post

The critic's prayer, offered up regularly every January, is, "Please let me get through the year without having to see A Midsummer Night's Dream again. And if I do have to see it, please let it be indoors."

There may, though, be a lesson here, on the lines of being careful what you wish not to happen. Good, fresh stagings of the Dream do come along every so often. In all my years on this job, I count three of them, of which two, I confess, were in the open air. Now along comes Richard Rose's production, also alfresco, to make it four. It's by far the best thing I've seen at what used to be known as the Dream in High Park but has now renamed itself Shakespeare in the Park, possibly to fend off any advances from rival playwrights.

One thing that distinguishes Rose's production from previous High Park offerings is that it seems to enjoy the park itself, and wants us to enjoy it, too. There's no built-up setting getting in the way of the natural one. Indeed, about the only scenic feature is an onstage painting depicting yet more parkland, or a small section of same.

The proceedings are fresh, funny and fast, the last quality owing something to the fact that the text has been quite extensively trimmed: something of which I disapprove in theory but which I appreciated in practice. The cuts are playful and intelligent, as is most of the show.

Theseus's court on this occasion looks and sounds traditionally - indeed stereotypically - Canadian, with pipers piping and Mounties mounting guard. The duke himself arrives by golf cart, his bride in the passenger seat, and delivers his opening speech through a microphone, giving the populace official notice of the approaching festivities. As is now customary to the point of cliche, his Hippolyta strongly resents the arrangement, but the obvious objection to this interpretation (i.e. that not a single line in the text supports it) is more cleverly overcome than usual. The lady delivers her own, equally celebratory, speech over the same PA system, through gritted teeth and obviously under duress. Later in the scene, she responds to her lover's attempt to bring her back into the conversation by getting into the golf cart and driving off in it. That'll teach him to patronize an Amazon. So there is at least the skeleton of a relationship here, one that feeds logically into the couple's transformation (now equally traditional, though equally tendentious) into Oberon and Titania.

As far as I've ever been able to follow it, the argument behind the doubling is that the eventual reconciliation of their fairy surrogates allows the royal mortals to work out their own differences. But as Oberon brings Titania to heel by playing a cruel erotic trick on her and blackmailing her into handing over her adopted child, it seems about as much of a feminist victory as The Taming of the Shrew, if not less so.

Still, the immortal couple's initial confrontation gains enormously here by being staged as a one-on-one verbal duel, unhampered by giggly attendants; and also by having Titania carrying the disputed changeling around with her, obviously intent on doing an ill-met-by-moonlit flit. Tamara Podemski's Hippolyta and Titania make an excellent double, respectively sulky and sultry. Dmitry Chepovetsky is a jovial enough Theseus, but is hampered as Oberon by his inability to sustain a legato line. His chief vocal resource is a threatening snort, mainly employed to keep Gil Garratt's laboriously recalcitrant Puck in line; his more benevolent impulses are hardly credible.

Titania apart, it's the humans who come off best here, right down to John Dolan's heavy father Egeus, that grumpy advocate of honour killing; his entry down the middle of the auditorium disrupts the scene as passionately as it should. In his wake come the rival young men, who are contrasted studies in entitlement; Eric Morin's Lysander is a narcissistic macho man, much given to tearing of his own and other people's clothes, while Ali Momen's Demetrius, a more subtle portrait, is a bespectacled nerd driven to competing extremes of petulant frustration by the girl he loves and the one who loves him.

The latter is Sarah Sherman's Helena, the self-styled spaniel, revelling in her role as everyone's complaining victim; the former is Sophia Kolinas' pert Hermia, whose awakening in the forest is the most revelatory moment of the evening; she takes her solitude as a playful joke on her lover's part before realizing, terrified, that it's the real thing. Both these actresses are to be watched.

What about the workers? The script names six of them; here there are only four, and three of them have their names and ethnicities, and all of them their occupations, altered. Peter Quince is now Pierre Le Coing, a temperamental auteur whom Pierre Simpson makes uncannily convincing. Flute the bellows-mender (this must have been a specialized trade even in Elizabethan England) is now Francis Filchenkov, gaunt and Slavic and, in Mark Crawford's performance, amusingly enthusiastic in his drag role as Thisbe.

Tom Snout the tinker is now, courtesy of Richard Lee, Tom Chow the gofer and the only man among them to speak in the stage rustic generally known as Mummerset. Nick Bottom is still Nick Bottom but he's moved up from weaver to silk-scarved realtor, with airs to match; in John Cleland's enchanting performance he's unshakably sure of himself, and is the only aspiring Pyramus I remember to audition for the role of tyrant by underplaying rather than the reverse; it's very effective.

The fairies - Peaseblossom, Cobweb & Co. - who attend on him after his transformation to an ass are played by his fellows, similarly transmogrified in skirts. This is funny, but it's also daft: Why should they worry what's happened to him when they've seen it for themselves? Or is this just random doubling, for the sake of economy? Those who know the play may be kept in pleasing suspense over just how, in these reduced circumstances, the mechanicals will mount their play-within-the-play.

Actually, it works out beautifully. Moonshine's part is taken by Monsieur Le Coing himself, and it's one of the best things he does. As for he - or she - who plays the Lion's part: A volunteer is enlisted from the audience, and you wouldn't believe how well that goes. Well, maybe you would.

And there's another extra character; in celebration of her 60th anniversary, Queen Elizabeth II makes a personal appearance - in a different person every night, apparently - in the onstage audience. Which, since the Dream may have originally been written as a court entertainment, is appropriate as well as amusing. The current monarch gets a show well worth her time and travel. OK, I have seen funnier performances of Pyramus and Thisbe. Not many, though.