Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
The latest production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the York Theatre Royal sits somewhere between being a school panto version of a Shakespeare classic, a stand-up comedy improvisation and an avant-garde piece of theatre. This Filter and Lyric Hammersmith co-production is truly a theatrical laboratory in which a wacky concoction of images, sounds and ideas leaves its audiences mystified by the tripping hallucinations they have encountered.
Riding off the back of their success with Twelfth Night and The Three Sisters, the collaboration of the Filter Theatre Company and Lyric Hammersmith has once again pushed the boundaries with this most recent production and created real Marmite theatre. As the performance began and the audience were invited to become part of the action, patronisingly told of the play’s ‘metafiction’ and subjected to strained, well-worn jokes, I was prepared to set my stall firmly in the hate camp. Yet this apparent naiveté and saccharinity soon revealed a far more intelligent vision underlying the production. For the ramshackle, makeshift play that ensues brings to the foreground major questions of Shakespeare’s text surrounding art, audience and the artificial in an almost Brechtian way but without losing the humour, accessibility and entertainment of arguably Shakespeare’s best loved comedy.
Music is ultimately at the heart of this production with the techno and rock sounds eerily complementing the shifting moods of the play. Indeed, the Athenian forest that is traditionally mythical and magical becomes a kind of summer music festival full of intoxication, impulsive romances and the fleeting freedom to be anything you wish. This is all overlooked by Puck and Bottom, played by Ferdy Roberts and Fergus O’Donnell who were unquestionably the highlight of the show without whose exceptional acting the production would have become unbearably amateurish.
This play did have moments of sheer brilliance as well as moments of incomprehensible madness. However, ultimately I feel that for all its innovative intentions it was a production composed of far too many ideas in which many of the nuances of the text were completely overlooked and believable characterisation was on occasions utterly forgotten. For me, it tried to achieve too many paradoxes of being high art yet popular, quirky yet ingrained in the text and professional yet unpolished which resulted in the production never really finding its feet. Yet with all its weird experimentalism and self-mockery, I do have a suspicion that it is very possible that Shakespeare himself might have actually sneakily quite liked this.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is on at the York Theatre Royal until 3rd December 2011.
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