Lauren Shantall
If A Midsummer Night’s Dream focuses, in part, on the near-disastrous consequences of the generation gap, then director Jesse Knott’s version provides a streetwise, youth-based antidote to the problem facing today’s theatre: how to draw new audiences.
She has dramatically revolutionised the original. Located in a dream world that is harrowingly familiar, the play now speaks, in undertones, of an industrial ethos, of drug culture, of global disillusionment.
The massive success of Shopping and Fucking can only attest to the need for theatre to capture contemporaneity. So why then, one might ask, perform a Shakespearean text? Yet what better means of revitalising theatre than by taking tradition and turning it on its head?
In keeping with her view that “text- bound plays have had their day”, Knott has cut the original to produce a spectacle in which the plot is secondary to visual display.
Its design bears comparison with Baz Luhrmann’s stylish screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Yet this is hardly the hip Miami of retro-Latin chic. It is a post-apocalyptic netherworld, a late-Nineties fairyland of the dispassionate.
Audience members are ushered into the darkened interior of the Grafic Arts Trust warehouse with offers of cocktail cherries from eerie, otherworldly figures belonging to Titania’s entourage, while an errant Puck is suspended motionless under a muted spotlight. The setting is moody -predominantly black and ashen grey with faint touches of a sickly luminous red – and constructed like a nightclub, complete with strobes, fire-jugglers, projected video stills and a live band.
Actors weave in and out of the audience, fallout fairies leer suggestively from behind makeshift scaffolding. The lines of the mechanicals are rapped to the hardcore bass of hip-hop outfit Blunt. The costumes trace a line from the past to the funky street fashion of today. A tattooed Titania and an Oberon resembling Wes Craven’s Darkman conduct a distorted dialogue. Hippolyta dons classical garb. Helena prances in platforms and a feather boa.
Shakespeare himself was populist, so these devices are appropriate drawcards. Where many fringe productions lack an edge, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is daring. The production is not polished or flawless. It is raw and, in parts, somewhat disconnected. But these criticisms may be overlooked in favour of its freshness and because for the most part it is simply scintillating to watch.
And if its aim is to push the boundaries of expectation, then it is a bold step.