Oh What Fools

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

There is a strain of cruelty in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Peter Sellars' Stratford production embraces it, to the exclusion of almost everything else. The result is certainly striking. It's also monotonous.

Sellars, for several decades America's enfant terrible of theatre and opera direction, dubs his version "a chamber play." This can be, and is probably meant to be, taken several ways. It could refer to the chosen venue, a spartan civic building that the Stratford festival has never used before. It could mean the onstage setting, a small, bare and grimy room. And it could describe the acting forces; the play's roles are divided between just four actors. They are Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindstrom and Mike Nadajewski, and they are all very good.

The show starts conventionally enough: Johnstone as Theseus looks forward to his and Hippolyta's wedding day, Afful as Hippolyta rather snappishly tells him to keep his knickers on. (I paraphrase.) She has more than usual reason to be moody, since on his next speech Johnstone is visibly and audibly transferring his attentions to Lindstrom, who seems at this point to be playing Hermia, a character who in a strict textual reading wouldn't be on stage yet. In this show, though, none of the actors gets to come or go, and the action proceeds in a series of jump cuts. A fair number of lines have been eliminated, but those that remain are in the traditional order. In an instant Hermia and Lysander are plotting their elopement and confiding in Helena, who is lamenting her abandonment by Demetrius. In a notable departure from just about every other production of the play, neither her complaints here nor her subsequent repeated throwings of herself at him are treated as being in the least comic.

Theseus' fickleness certainly accords with what we're told about him. It's also a pointer to the production's view of inconstancy as the natural condition of men if not of women, unless the latter happen to be fairy queens tricked into one-night stands with donkey-headed tradesmen. This is a world of mean girls and even meaner boys, and the meanness can be savage. Some things are stunning. One is Lindstrom's passionate delivery, right in Oberon's face, of Titania's speech about the disputed changeling boy; significantly, her love for the child registers less strongly than her grief over his mother's death. Another is the way the same actress as Hermia, lost and terrified in the wood, gropes her way towards the voice of the man she believes still loves her. This gets us into the four-way lovers' quarrel, here played for maximum verbal violence.

"Lord, what fools these mortals be" is Puck's famous summary, and most productions rightly find some playfulness in the folly. Sellars, though, will have none of it. I have an abiding distrust of directors who think that being funny is beneath them (possibly because they aren't very good at it); still, being unfunny on purpose is preferable to doing it by accident. Too many productions have loaded this scene with random horseplay, which is not at all the same thing as actual comedy. Sellars' intensity has a shape and a rhythm. It isn't all there is to the scene, but it's something.

The director seems to have the same attitude as Bottom the weaver, who accepts being cast as the lover but would really like to play the tyrant. Johnstone is Bottom here, and when he does his impromptu tyrant audition he isn't just showing off to his friends; he genuinely wants to terrify them. (And us.) He's unexpectedly lovely in his morning-after scene with Titania, languidly bossing her attendants around, but his great awakening speech goes for nothing, because we've never really got to know him. The mechanicals' earlier scenes have been cut to ribbons, as if they were just tiresome waystations on the road to the full performance of Pyramus and Thisbe: a performance presented here as if it were an actual tragedy, rather than the burlesque of one.

This irons out a vital part of the play's complexity. In fact it's sentimental, which is ironic, considering the director's professed aim of stripping away the play's traditional sentimental veneer. But then, that tradition doesn't actually exist; I have seen productions of the Dream good, bad and (the huge majority) indifferent, but none that conformed to the pretty stereotype that directors always claim to be reacting against.

Strangely enough, this production misses a few of the play's own discordant tricks. It eliminates the patriarchal sentence of death that prompts the lovers' elopement in the first place. It makes far less of Titania's post- aphrodisiac revulsion than does Stratford's concurrent mainstage production. In possible compensation, Afful's Puck definitely accentuates the negative, being not just heartlessly mischievous but permanently angry, as if earth-girdling weren't all it was cracked up to be. There's a peculiar amount of shouting in this show, considering that the actors are (inexcusably) miked, but Puck does the most of it. Her account of the damned souls who infest the night is done with especial gloomy relish. Nadejewski's Oberon does get to make his countervailing morning-glory speech about "spirits of another sort" but it seems perfunctory by comparison. The production obviously prefers the darkness to the light.

That's literally true. There's a stark contrast here between the night in which most of the action transpires and the blinding morning light that succeeds it. That's interesting, in theory; in practice it means that we spend most of our time peering at a dimly-lit stage whose effect progresses inexorably from depressing to soporific to boring. The main design element isn't actually onstage at all; it's an elaborate installation (by Abigail DeVille) in the hall's ceiling, that we forget as soon as the play starts. (In the words of the great Walter Kerr, "One looks at the ceiling only during excessively bad plays.") Its elements include chairs preserved from Stratford's original tent theatre of the 1950s: a possibly titillating detail but one that you couldn't know unless somebody had told you.

This, though, is consistent with the production as a whole; if you don't already know the play, and know it well, you're unlikely to understand it. So much for making Shakespeare accessible. If you are among the learned, you can enjoy watching each of the actors seamlessly switching from one character to another; if you aren't, you won't even know who those characters are. Let me be clear: Sellars is a director worth inviting (and, I hope, re-inviting) to Stratford, and this production is worth seeing. But it's a one-note treatment of a rich symphonic work and thus, for all its surface solemnity, a frivolous one.