Mike Nadajewski as Puck and André Sills as Oberon in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'Ann Baggley/Supplied
- Title: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Written by: William Shakespeare
- Performed by: Vivien Endicott-Douglas, Jessica B. Hill, Jordin Hall, Thomas Duplessie, André Sills, Sara Topham, Mike Nadajewski, Michael Spencer-Davis, Sarah Dodd, Steven Hao, Sara-Jeanne Hosie
- Director: Graham Abbey
- Company: Stratford Festival, developed in collaboration with Groundling Theatre
- Venue: Tom Patterson Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs until Sept. 26
Critic’s Pick
You’d be forgiven for wondering if A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now playing in a gloriously buoyant production at the Stratford Festival, is some sort of contemporary adaptation – a modernization of William Shakespeare’s fantastical comedy.
After all, in director Graham Abbey’s care, the Bard’s language sounds immediate and current, the gags topical and fresh. A few particularly riotous moments read almost like an episode of 30 Rock or I Think You Should Leave.
But beyond a few jokes (including, on opening night, a particularly sharp improvisation about outgoing artistic director Antoni Cimolino), Shakespeare’s 400-year-old text has mostly remained untouched. Abbey’s minimal interventions to the play as written – a new prologue about the evils of cellphones in the theatre, for instance, written in crisp iambic pentameter – are clever and well-situated within the script.
The rest of the laughs – and there are many, many laughs – come straight from the Bard himself, treated with affection and precision by Abbey and his star-studded cast. Lines such as “I am invisible,” in which its speaker stands in plain sight, are newly hilarious in Abbey’s hands. The production, three hours though it may be, is huge-hearted and genuinely funny: That intimidating runtime ticks by with barely a second thought.
Story-wise, it’s much the same as ever, a tangle of madcap subplots and inadvisable romances that eventually erupts into chaos. In one storyline, four young lovers – Lysander (Jordin Hall), Hermia (Vivien Endicott-Douglas), Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie) and Helena (Jessica B. Hill) – navigate disapproving parents and unrequited crushes.
In another, a troupe of actors, led by Rita Quince (Sarah Dodd) and Nick Bottom (Michael Spencer-Davis), gets ready to put on a production of Pyramus and Thisbe.
In still another, a clan of fairies frolics in a mossy forest, exalting their king Oberon (André Sills) and queen Titania (Sara Topham). And while each of the fairies is mischievous in their own way, it’s Puck (Mike Nadajewski) who emerges as the ultimate trickster, a meddling imp with a penchant for pranks.
It’s old news that A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s plot hinges on a few unsavoury themes. There’s a worthwhile debate to be had about the ethics of Oberon’s powerful love potion, which, when administered to its unconscious victim, forces them to become infatuated with the next person they see.
Graham Abbey’s loving treatment of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy somehow manages to preserve the writer’s text while updating how it lands in the present day.Ann Baggley/Supplied
But Abbey doesn’t shy away from those frictions: His production drills as hard into the play’s dramaturgy as it does its humour, resulting in a Dream that’s refreshingly robust, its frothiness doled out in delightful, meaningful bursts. Helena, for instance, so often played as a hawkish punchline, is richly considered in Hill’s portrayal: Her performance is entertaining but never condescending in its estimation of the woman in Shakespeare’s text. Hill, in her ninth season at the Stratford Festival, sparkles like fairy dust in the role, energetic and vivid as she chases after Duplessie’s Demetrius.
Indeed, there are no loose bricks in the wall of Abbey’s cast, from the ever-reliable Topham, Hall and Sills to Dodd, whose gender-bent take on the director of the Mechanicals is side-splittingly silly. (Steven Hao and Sara-Jeanne Hosie are standouts in Dream’s “tedious and brief” play-within-a-play: While the Mechanicals’ riotous Pyramus and Thisbe isn’t short, and in fact takes up a solid chunk of Dream’s second half, it’s far from tedious.)
But as Puck and Nick, Nadajewski and Spencer-Davis offer masterfully nuanced performances in roles that, in less capable hands, could easily be overplayed. Nadajewski constantly calibrates his cheeky improv to the intimacy of the Tom Patterson Theatre, reacting to the audience in real time and never once wearing Puck’s impudence thin; Spencer-Davis offers similar subtlety as Nick, whose transformation into a donkey is comic without being overkill.
It’s old news that the plot of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' hinges on a few unsavoury themes, but director Abbey doesn’t shy away from those frictions.David Hou/Supplied
The whole thing comes together on a set as pretty as it is functional, designed by Lorenzo Savoini with an eye toward nature. A massive orb floats over the theatre’s thrust stage, and smart video and projection mapping by Normal Studio suggest everything from the moon to the innards of Puck’s fanciful mind. Joshua Quinlan’s costumes, meanwhile, weave the roots of the enchanted forest into the souls of its inhabitants, with iridescent fairy wings and delicate flower crowns that, along with Thomas Ryder Payne’s original songs, suggest a total escape from the din of modern life.
Well, maybe not a total escape. In Abbey’s production, Shakespeare’s characters don’t feel all that much like characters – they feel like friends, or cousins, or long-lost schoolmates. Their language is recognizable and quippy; their laughter sounds an awful lot like ours. Abbey’s loving treatment of Shakespeare’s most popular comedy somehow manages to preserve the writer’s text while updating how it lands in the present day: Talk about a dream.