A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a surefire box office winner. It’s long been considered one of Shakespeare’s most approachable plays, due to its appealing characters, humorous plot complications, and language that rings the changes from rustic simplicity through witty aristocratic banter to lyrical flights of supernatural fancy. As such, it’s typically considered actor-proof; say your lines, hit your marks and you’ve done your job.
Director-proof, however, can be another story; from Max Reinhardt’s 1930s outdoor spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl through Peter Hall’s 1960s “white box” chamber version with the Royal Shakespeare Company, to recent decades’ fad for gender-bending within the core romances, Shakespeare is frequently swallowed up in directors’ need to Get Our Attention And Make A Statement. The first time my wife and I saw the play at Stratford in 2004, Leon Rubin’s production conceits (“The enchanted wood’s like a — a rain forest! So we’ll set the whole thing in South America! Oh, and the fairies are acrobats too!”) proved an active turn-off; the characters and humor were all but smothered by the bells and whistles of distracting costumes, scenery and spectacle.
In his program note, director Graham Abbey threatens full-on Regietheater, making opaque noises about reveling in disorder and the necessity of rebellion. But fortunately, Abbey’s basic trust in Shakespeare. along with his solid dramatic instincts, carry the day. This is by and large A Midsummer Night’s Dream as veteran admirers know it and those encountering it for the first time should.
Abbey’s biggest tweak is setting the action in late Victorian England, and that works – because arguably, Shakespeare’s original human characters are pretty doggone universal across cultures, no matter their Athenian names. So Evan Buliung’s Theseus is appropriately pompous yet engaging, whether wooing Ijeoma Emesowum’s reluctant but not adamant Hippolyta or throwing up his hands at the young lovers’ relationship hassles. Vivien Endicott-Douglas is a wonderfully straight-up Hermia, gushingly in love; Jessica B. Hill grabs the majority of the laughs as a dryly funny yet vulnerable Helena; Jordin Hall and Thomas Duplessie start out bland and interchangeable as Lysander and Demetrius, but put clever props (a ukelele and a deerstalker hat, respectively) to good use opening up their characters. The rustic mechanicals – morphed to traveling circus players in this version – are, as usual, winningly earnest and hopelessly out of their depth from top (Sarah Dodd’s flustered dramaturge Rita Quince) to Bottom (Nick Spencer-Davis in an appropriately bravura comic turn).
And of course, when all and sundry wander into the enchanted wood of Shakespeare’s fairies Oberon (Andre Sills, seasoning his usual power and magnetism with sly humor), Titania (a spellbinding Sara Topham, whose every line and gesture compel attention) and Puck (Mike Nadajewski, energetically committed to maximum disruption) — mayhem breaks loose, with the audience quite literally in the midst of it. As fairies troop down the theatre aisles to the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre (pulsating with subtly immersive digital projections and surround-sound effects) and Nadajewski persistently breaks the fourth wall, playing to the crowd with sneaky pranks and Phil Collins-style party tricks, we wind up every bit as loopy as the lovers, as bemused as Bottom and company. And Abbey’s second-biggest tweak – unwinding Oberon’s curse on Titania through mutual forgiveness instead of further deception – puts us in the same boat as everyone else exiting the wood; not quite certain of our footing, but ready for a breather via The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe (enacted by the mechanicals with eager flair, organic pratfalls and a hilarious pastiche soundtrack of classical/Romantic chestnuts, courtesy of Michael Man’s Robin Starveling).
To sum up: most (though not all) directors’ theater versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stutter and stumble trying to make their point. Though Abbey’s take on the play is portentous on the surface, the loose, fantastical staging and slapstick comedy of this production issue directly from Shakespeare’s characters and situations, given fire and vibrancy by a first-rate cast where the young players step up to the level of their veteran Festival colleagues. The few tiny hiccups here are vastly outweighed by a real devotion to the absurdity and the grace baked in by the poet himself. From Row G of the theatre, this was an utterly enjoyable vision of the Dream, one that brings to life Theseus’ Act 5 summation of the night:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to
heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
— Rick Krueger
A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre through September 26th. For information, schedule and ticket sales click here.
Spirit of Cecilia 
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