A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and so she thinks

Creating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Clapham

admin — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 18:04:49 +0000

Theatre is a living and breathing medium, language a lively form, and Shakespeare a playwright for all times. Yet too often it can be stifling, rigid, and uniform as it follows rules and plays at being ‘proper.’ But when it comes to seeing an art form you know well, it’s not enough just to have to have it replayed. Instead, as Lee McGowan said about locative literature, ‘Like a Hobnob in a hot brew, I want to dunk all my other senses in it too.’

Creation Theatre take A Midsummer Night’s Dream and make it a reality, all on the streets of Clapham with Omnibus Theatre. Part performance and part treasure hunt, we become both actors and audiences in the build up to Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s wedding.

Few productions have the audience sent on cryptic quests, required to sing for freedom, bundled into vans and carry gifts to the happy couples – but that’s part of the magic of this dream. Few productions also have adults weeping with laughter and sheer silliness and spontaneity. Boundaries broken, it does start to all feel a bit fantastical.

Inhibitions and purism won’t really be welcome here, as scheming fairies and talented actors twist and contort the text. A clever use of digital makes the magical scenes even more evanescent than a traditional theatre space, and technology becomes an enhancing medium. Even though Rolos, estate agents and Clapham aren’t in the original Folio Shakespeare did shift and change things for his time, responding both to current events and the groundlings the company performed in front of.

Bottom and Patsy Quince are played outstandingly well by Rhodri Lewis and Shelley Atkins, Giles Stoakley is convincing and engaging as Egeus, and brilliant energy comes from Natasha Rickman as Helena and Lucy Pearson in the role of small yet fierce Hermia.

Far from a passive audience, we become energetic parts to the performance. Director Zoe Seaton describes it as ‘free range’ theatre and it’s certainly more exhilarating and expansive than most immersive theatre. Cleverly done, our group of four – Hippolyta’s second cousins and thus wedding guests – were given clues and meeting places to solve, and followed our own trail without tripping over any other ‘guests’ until we all joined back together for the finale wedding picnic.

Creation have done something rather magical in their offering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not just interactive, but engaging, visceral and bold. Tricky to describe without giving it away, let’s just say that your trip to Athens will challenge all your preconceptions about theatre, Shakespeare, and Clapham.

Running from June 16th – 30th at Omnibus Theatre, Clapham. Tickets are available here.

Gender Reversed A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Review

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 10:07:20 +0000

A stage coated in dead leaves, a bright faced woman proffering coats to the audience, and a silence. This is the Forest of Eden, where strange and magical things can happen. Spirits frolic in the woods, love potions turn people mad and a donkey’s ears start growing from a man’s head. And it’s not the only thing that feels a little strange at first in the Reversed Shakespeare Company’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pleasance Theatre in London.

A gender reversed version, where females play males and vice versa, it’s a little difficult to get your head around the characters to begin with, and not only because of how they look. Helena (Matthew McFetridge) is a red bearded man, and a man has ‘duty’ to his mother. ‘A scandal on my sex’ feels different when spoken by a man, and it’s almost uncomfortable to see him on his knees begging. All of this just proves how stereotyped our perceptions are and how gendered norms infiltrate everywhere. I never noticed before how Helena’s words ‘Two lovely berries moulded on one stem’ are so phallic until spoken by a man, or how a gentleman fearing a Bottom’s (Ailis Duff) lion is even more ludicrous than women. Charlotte Mulliner plays a brilliant Lysander, and Matt Maltby as Hermia brings out the indignation of being ‘low’ brilliantly.

Super fastpaced (just under two hours with an interval) it’s a bold performance that manages to be entertaining and provoke thoughts to consider. Sometimes confusing and certainly irreverent, a small cast where actors double up makes things even trickier. But it’s worth persevering, especially in a setting where chaos reigns. In fact, it’s a really brilliant way to raise the issue of gender roles and the power of the sexes, without overtly pressing it home. One small change to casting and the rest is in the power of the audience as they engage with the story.

Comedic and physical, touching and delicate, it’s a brilliantly executed performance that feels magical. Raising issues relevant to the era in which it’s performed, and exploring emotions and experiences universal to time and place, it is feels like it is exactly what Shakespeare intended.

Directed by Laura Jasper, tickets are selling out fast so head here as soon as you can. If you miss out you can find out about future productions on the Reversed Shakespeare Company’s website.

Shakespeare – in reverse: Challenging gender stereotypes

admin — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 20:31:27 +0000

It’s difficult to describe the concept of The Reversed Shakespeare Company’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that doesn’t sound like a Blur song. A play about the relationship between a boy and a girl, written by a boy, played by a company of boys originally, but now with a more gender balanced cast of boys and girls, that is seeing the roles reversed and the boys become girls and the girls become boys.
So in their portrayal of Shakespeare’s best-loved comedy they’ve switched the gender of each character.

A man chases a woman through a wood begging her to love him.
Five incompetent women try, and fail, to put on a play to impress the royals.
The king of the fairies falls madly in love with a woman disguised as a donkey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZWRhDcBB5I
If that all sounds a little different to what you’ve come to expect, that’s the idea. The Reversed Shakespeare Company was set up in 2015 by Lindsay Dukes, Cassie Webb and Matthew Maltby, and between them played roles from Romeo to Beatrice, via Miranda, Marina, Iago and Third Lord. Recognising that women make up 16% of Shakespeare’s characters, Women speak as few as 0.67% of the lines in some of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Timon of Athens, yet 68% of the London theatregoing audience is female there might be more for female actors to do than, in Lindsay’s words just be, ‘dragged across the stage as Lavinia or paraded in the brothel as Marina.’
They also wanted to see what would happen if men could see and experience the sort of vulnerability afforded to Shakespeare’s women but not to his male characters and in the process ask some questions. Are women and men all capable of the same actions, feelings and beliefs? How do women woo, and can men be wooed? Is vulnerability reserved only for the physically weak? Can a woman hold the space that men seem to have inherited naturally?
And crucially, can a woman with a donkey’s head and a need to steal the spotlight really win over the fairy king?
The debut production runs at The Pleasance Theatre from March 16^th-27^th, and features a programme of talks and discussions. Tickets are available here.

Shakespeare Shorts

admin — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:59:43 +0000

Shakespeare is so well known that it takes guts and effort to reinterpret in new ways that allow the brilliance to shine through for audiences in an accessible way, and Action To The Word manage this dynamically and dazzle with it in their production of Shakespeare Shorts, now on at independent venue Camden People’s Theatre.
Directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones, and with only a cast of ten, they effortlessly sparkle through some of the most emotional, hard hitting, resonant and profound scenes of the Bard’s work with a vibrancy that brings a fresh perspective to the eyes gathered in this small theatre. Dressed in black with minimal lighting, the ensemble clearly demonstrate the wisdom of the words and seem to accentuate this via the stark simplicity of all that they do. No set. No costume. Simply the power of their interpretation.
Punctuated with modern pop music to emphasise the shifts between scenes and plays (amongst others the soundtrack features Drop Dead Gorgeous by Republica, 10CC’s The Thing We Do For Love, and the classic True from Spandau Ballet) they rally through Hamlet, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and well as others from the canon,with startling clarity and crispness. Managing to move between light comedy to powerful tragedy with fluidity and agility, keeping each clearly resonant, the Bard is brought up to date – or rather his universal themes are made blatantly obvious – love, sex, drugs, fun, violence and danger.
The company developed the production in Cambridge when most were still students, and it remains as slick and hard hitting as when they first performed it back in 2008. Click below for tickets.