THEATRE: Neville Josie
A LARGE, rubbery balloon hovers over the performance space. It could be construed as a safe sex metaphor, if you’re into that kind of thing. Given the repressive times in which he lived, William Shakespeare was circumspect about most things, but not about sex. Take A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Plunging into his unconscious, he produced a dramatic text that celebrates hormones on the loose in a paen to Bacchanalian excess, situated in a forest that is magically free of the puritanical constraints of the Elizabethan ruling class.
The idea of locating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre excited me — here was a ready-made context in which the gap could be narrowed between dramatic text and performance, performers and spectators, between form and content. But what director Patrick Sandford’s production does is to ignore form and literally serve the text.
Clad in stifling mock-Edwardian dress, Sandford’s actors, like repressed colonials, rampage feverishly through a jungle, touched by its heat and sensuality. Anthea Thompson and Jana van Niekerk, playing Hermia and Helena respectively, give impressive performances as they tumble through the unknown after having escaped the patriarchal world where daughters are coerced under pain of death into marriages they do not desire. Here, the mortal world epitomises absolute tyranny over the body and spirit.
Under Sandford’s direction, the fairy forest is not only awash with fertility symbols but is clearly a place where preconceptions about love and sex should be challenged. The jungle becomes a catalyst for a host of forbidden and therefore tempting transgressions, including paedophilia and a desire for the exotic “other” implied in the tussle between Titania and her king, Oberon, for the possession of the Indian boy; bestiality, suggested in Titania’s flagrant obsession with the transmogrified Bottom; and glimpses of the homo-erotic in Oberon’s relationship with Puck.
Unfortunately, Sean Taylor’s Oberon lacks conviction or the tension he needs to be part ruler of everything he surveys. The best he could conjure up on opening night was boredom masquerading as insouciance, giving Mary Dreyer’s Titania very little to work from.
A welcome and funny touch was the appearance of the grunge fairies, including a gloriously pregnant Cobweb, wearing worn leggings and shod in odd combinations of mountain boots and sneakers.
This is a production that people converted to Shakespeare will enjoy. It is fun, vaguely daring in its treatment of the content, but still safe and familiar. No risks are taken. Sandford employs an aesthetic informed by the tyrannical conventions of the proscenium theatre — row upon row of fixed seats facing a fixed stage, with specially constructed grassy mounds, garden furniture, a maypole and a canvas-like canopy cleverly converting at appropriate times into a hammock.
All this, however, does nothing to free the actors from the two-dimensional confines of a performance space framed by an invisible proscenium. Nor does it encourage or challenge the spectator to participate actively in different ways of seeing, let alone experiencing new spatial relationships with the performers. No transgression, literal or otherwise, can occur because of the traditional boundaries that keep spectator and performer apart.
What is the point of creating a theatre piece out of doors when it is still bound and gagged by the restrictive and deadly conventions of most Eurocentric indoor theatre?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs until February 18