Shakespearean Play is a Dream Realized: Inventive, Disciplined, Physical Production

a midsummer night’s dream
Resurgence theatre company
the national post

It's attracted less attention than the pending extinction of The Lord of the Rings, but the Royal Bank Festival of Classics, at Coronation Park in Oakville, has ceased operations. This year's promised production of The Merchant of Venice will not be happening. This is sad news. It had one of the most enchanting natural settings of any of the open-air theatres around Toronto, and some of its productions -- Diana Leblanc's Twelfth Night, Michael Shamata's Love's Labour's Lost and, last year, Miles Potter's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- have been outstandingly enjoyable. And with that magic lake in the background, I was just waiting for them to do The Seagull.

The Resurgence Theatre Company in Newmarket also has an enchanting liquid setting; at least it did last time I was there two years ago. After a year's break, Resurgence has resurged but in another part of the forest, or at least the park. It has had to re-pitch its tent (I mean that literally) out of sight of water, but with the back of its stage now giving on to a breathtaking avenue of trees. It cried out to be used for ceremonial entrances, or at least for entrances, and it was disappointing that it never was.

There is nothing else in David Ferry's production to be disappointed by. It is yet another Dream, that manages not to be yet another Dream. The director, who thinks I'm a purist, informed me cheerfully when I arrived that I was going to hate it, and I can see why. It begins with the words "you have to wake up early for your mom's wedding tomorrow;" and you don't have to be a scholar to guess that that line was not written by Shakespeare. It's spoken by a nanny to a little boy whose name, aha, is Will and whose parents (one natural, one adoptive) have been fighting, despite the impending happy day. The nanny reassures him, and leaves him reading a book that looks suspiciously like a copy of the play. He, of course, proceeds to dream it. His nanny reappears as Puck, his mom and dad are Titania and Oberon and he himself becomes the Changeling Child over whom the fairy king and queen are fighting a custody case. He doesn't seem to be overly worried about it. He has a high old time; when he isn't being a wide-eyed spectator, he's nudging the other actors into position or placing important props in their hands. He's played, with great command, by Robert Dunsmore-Van Wart.

This is a very physical production. One expects the four-sided lovers' quarrel to be acrobatic, but Irene Poole, a self-propelling human missile, may be the first Hermia to spend half her time lying horizontal in mid-air, supported by the unwilling hands of one or other of her menfolk, and thrashing furiously. Hermia is not generally reckoned to be one of the great Shakespearean heroines, but Poole is the second actress in my experience (Kristin Thomson was the first) to make her seem practically the centre of the play. She turns her trademark intensity to comic ends. This is a Hermia who, when informed in the first scene that she will have to choose between death and the cloister, milks her situation for all the tragic dignity she can get; who, when bidding farewell to her Lysander with "me must starve our sight ... till morrow deep midnight," blows him a heavily dramatized kiss; and who, when awaking to find him vanished, is mocked by echoes that might have strayed in from The Duchess of Malfi.

Maev Beaty's Helena, pouting with frustration, matches her in furious funniness, and the prescribed contrast in their statures ("her height, forsooth," rages Hermia, as if this were the last straw) could hardly be more graphically or wittily exploited. Lysander (Christopher Morris, scarily dismissive when he falls out of love) and Demetrius (Tim Campbell) do remarkably well with their lesser material; they share, once under the influence of Love Potion whichever-it-is, a delightful inability to pronounce the name "Hermia" without turning it into some kind of guttural obscenity. The horizontal-hold effect is used, by my count, just once too often, but that's more than forgivable. Indeed the whole quarrel scene, which in some productions can seem to go on forever, is as disciplined as it's inventive. Behind all the gymnastics, each of the actors keeps a steady thought line going.

The fairies are played with Jamaican inflections and varying degrees of success. Cara Ricketts' Titania is a sensuous delight, Jamie Robinson an Oberon who gives "I know a bank" a hip-hop beat and whose authority comes and goes along with his comprehensibility, and Lisa Codrington a Puck who needs to calm down and take several breaths. Still, the doubling of the fairy king and queen with the mortal rulers Theseus and Hippolyta makes more sense than usual. Both couples are visibly navigating toward a happy ending, and we're glad when they get there. Stuart Wilber brings off the unusual feat of playing Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed, all at the same time. Technology helps.

Art Hindle, like many Bottoms before him (if you follow me), ceases to be amusing when he's underneath his ass's head, but in his natural state he's very engaging. He's one of your quiet, assured Bottoms, rather than one of your raging egomaniacs, but conscious of his rights. Alon Nashman's anxious Quince knows, when casting him for Pyramus, that the best way is to appeal to his masculinity. "Pyramus," he says, "is a sweet-faced man," ignoring the adjective to stress the noun.

There's a great and instructive contrast when Quince is compelled to turn from director to actor and deliver the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe; he can hardly get the words out. Though when he gets round to outlining the plot, he's helped out by a silhouette show. I've never seen that before. Brendan Gall's Flute the bellows-mender looks as if he would be exceptionally good at his job, though how many Elizabethans would have needed to have their bellows mended on a regular basis has always puzzled me. And Don Allison is a nicely fretful Starveling, though his real triumph comes as the heavy father Egeus who, it seems, can hardly wait to see his daughter mewed up or married off. Asked to select a fate for her, Death or a Maiden, he'd probably vote for death. You end up thinking, as at all good productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, that this must be the best play ever written.