A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Runs June 6-15, part of Luminato: Toronto Festival of Arts + Creativity @ Canon Theatre (244 Victoria)
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Tim Supple
Presented by Dash Arts
By Daina Valiulis
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is my favorite Shakespeare play: funny, romantic, whimsical, timeless. A clear, solid story, and a feast for the imagination in terms of the infinite staging possibilities. That said, this can sometimes be disastrous if a director decides to go so crazy that it becomes a work of performance art rather than a play. Tim Supple’s production, however, is a well-balanced feast for the eyes and imagination, and a well-told story overall.
Supple found his performers and stage crew from all different areas across South Asia and created the production in India in 2005-2006. The production has toured all over, including both indoor and outdoor venues, the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, San Francisco, and now in Toronto as a part of the Luminato Festival.
A quick synopsis for you non-English majors: in the tale of four lovers who escape to the forest outside of Athens in pursuit of each other, the characters become the puppets of Oberon, the King of the Fairies (who is in the midst of a marital dispute with his Queen, Titania) and Puck, his loyal and mischievous attendant. Love juice is dabbed on various characters, causing chaos and confusion among the lovers and causing Titania to fall in love with Bottom, a man turned into a donkey. In the end, all is set right, people get married and everyone lives happily ever after.
Traditionally, the play is presented as a light, airy, comedic portrait of humanity. Characters stumble around, confused by their circumstances: it’s funny and endearing. Supple’s production, though funny, highlights the violence and sexual suggestiveness inherent in the text, which makes for an interesting and still faithful spin on a classic tale, but also makes the characters somewhat unsympathetic. Titania (Archana Ramaswamy) is particularly admirable as a strong woman character, but also a very angry one, who habitually tosses her long dark hair as she bites viciously into every line. The company also alternates between English and seven other languages (Hindi, Tamil, Malyalam, Marathi, Bengali, Sanskrit and Sinhala), which is both fascinating, speaking to Shakespeare’s universal appeal and relatability to people of all cultures, but also distracting as it tended to break up the rhythm of the iambic — the heartbeat and emotional core of any Shakespeare production which is why the emotional content is sometimes lacking (moreso in the beginning).
The staging, however, was gorgeous. Standout scenes — when the fairies (a band of screeching banshees with sticks) sing their Queen to sleep as she winds herself into a pod made of hanging silks like the ones used in Cirque du Soleil shows; the crazy scene when the lovers are all fighting over each other where Puck sets up a kind of cat’s cradle-like maze of rubber bands in which they all get entangled as they chase each other around the stage. Red powder is violently smeared across the faces of those affected by the love juice, musicians flank the stage, beating out tribal rhythms, and the brightly-coloured costumes add to the exoticism of the piece as a whole.
The group of rude mechanicals were the most touchingly human and Bottom (Joy Fernandes) delivers a hilarious performance with a big penis-like apparatus hanging from his crotch for most of the plot. By the end of the show, I was completely won over and left feeling the way one is meant to feel at the end of a Shakespearean comedy: sated and happy.
