a midsummer night’s dream
teatrul de comedie, The Premiere Dance Theatre
the globe and mail

I CAN get very Blimpish about the doubling of characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream, inclined to point out that the play got on perfectly well for centuries before certain young fellers - and Peter Brook, contrary to popular belief, was not the first - decided that Theseus and Oberon, the play's two authority figures, were actually the same person.

These days it's nearly always done, and perhaps the strongest argument in its favour is that it can be. In a play that depends on the intermingling of worlds, the Duke of Athens and the fairy king never appear on stage at the same time. Nor do their respective consorts, Hippolyta and Titania. The strongest argument against it is that the actors concerned invariably end up giving the same performance in both their roles.

In this visiting Romanian production, part of the du Maurier Ltd. World Stage festival - and which, before I forget, is brilliant, shouldn't be missed, and all that jazz - the pros and cons are multiplied since the leading actor, Serban Ionescu, doesn't just double, he triples. (Or should I say he trebles? Actually, he baritones.) The ruler he portrays swings unpredictably between benevolence and spite, and might fit very nicely into The Tempest. He is also an actor, and he seems to be dreaming the whole thing; we find him at the outset, before the received text gets going, enduring a fitful sleep in a tatty circus tent.

Not satisfied with his aristocratic and supernatural fiefdoms, Ionescu takes on the working class as well. His third role is that of Peter Quince, the carpenter, who masterminds the Athenian amateurs' one-night stand of Pyramus and Thisbe. When they finally get to do their show, the text dictates that Quince must revert to being Theseus. This means that not only are Bottom and his friends at the mercy of their own stage-fright and the ill- bred comments of their well-bred audience, they have also been abandoned by their director who is right out there, leading the jeers. But they rise above it, asserting their own dignity and that of the art they have adopted. Brook's production tried for the same effect, but it seemed pasted on. This is far more organic and far more moving.

My other comments are best arranged under the following heads: 1) Eroticism. Every production of the Dream thinks it has invented sex and this one contains the regulation amount of pawing. However, it has been integrated with the characters and the action. The fondling that goes on between Oberon and Titania during their quarrel not only freshens a familiar scene. it gives an added charge to his subsequent jealousy. It also links with his attitude toward the human lovers, which is usually a matter of an actor passing from one compartment of the play to another. The love-juiced squabbling of the four kids, which often seems to go on for ever, is here sharp and funny and ends with the four of them trapped beneath a huge red stage-cloth, thrown over them by Oberon and his minion Puck (a stockier and world-wearier sprite than usual).

2)  Reality. I have never seen a more believable crew of mechanicals. They even, especially Starveling the tailor in his rimless glasses and Snug the burly joiner, look as though they might be good at their jobs. Bottom (Serban Cellea) quite shook me up with his passionate demonstration of how he would play a tyrant. The same actor plays Egeus, the heavy father of the first scene, which I once bitterly decided was the least rewarding small part in Shakespeare. Here he comes in sick on a litter, looking like a cross between Gianni Schicchi and Red Riding Hood's granny. It somehow makes his tantrums mean more.

Helena is the very ecstasy of self-torturing adolescence, while Lysander, when he falls for her, goes to hilarious extremes of machismo. He and Demetrius are great ones for kicking sand in each other's faces. Naturally there is sand in this circus-ring. There is also, less naturally, a pool. Darie's production gets a lot out of it; or, more accurately, throws a lot into it.

3)  Terror. In Oberon's entourage are four squat individuals whose trench-coats and trilbies proclaim that, in Brendan Behan's immortal phrase, they are secret policemen and don't care who knows it. By the end, they have disappeared. I don't know what this proves. Maybe that Ceausescu was long but art is a bitch.

4)  Rhythm. Once you have accepted its terms, everything here looks right and inevitable. Sounds it, too. Of course any show in a language you don't understand takes on an air of ritual. Observing this, English- speaking directors and critics sometimes go into furies of self- flagellation. They needn't. Shakespeare in English and Shakespeare in translation are two different animals. Unshackled by the original rhythms (which, when you have them, can no more be ignored than the written notes in Mozart), they are freer than we are. But we, on the rare occasions when we can harness that energy and make it our own, are luckier.