A dream Dream: Theatre for A New Audience’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is perhaps Shakespeare’s most perennially evergreen play, in that its magic, beauty, strangeness and wonder never fades, but grows richer and deeper and more strange with every consecutive production. While it was the first Shakespeare play I studied at school, it is still the one play of Shakespeare’s that I love wholeheartedly and completely, and this production not only proves why, but is perhaps the most mercurial, effervescent, and beguiling Dream I have seen.

This production, first staged at New York’s Theatre for A New Audience in 2014, is directed by Julie Taymor, perhaps most well known for The Lion King musical as much as for the circumstances surrounding her Spider-Man musical, Turn Off The Dark. Known for her wild inventiveness, kaleidoscopic approach to style and design, and her reluctance to conform to expectations, this Dream lives up to its name and positively flies. Towards the end of the production’s season, Taymor and her collaborators were given money through Ealing Studios to film the production and create a cinematic Dream which brought its stage incarnation to even more beguiling life. Enlisting the help of Rodrigo Prieto (who previously shot Taymor’s film Frida), Taymor filmed four performances from four angles each, then spent the intervening days filming pick-up shots – close-ups, cutaways, shots you wouldn’t necessarily be able to achieve with an audience during a performance. Working with some eighty hours of footage, Taymor and editor Barbara Tulliver spent several months creating this cinematic Dream, drawing us further into the world of fairies, dark magic, shadows, and desire.

Out of the blue: Red Stitch’s Grounded

George Brant’s Grounded is an aggressive and provocative monologue. While you could almost call it a poem in many respects, or perhaps a poetic monologue, what you notice first is its language – its command of it, as much as the voice it is spoken by (or written for); and from the first moments, you are pushed back in your seat by the G-force of this play as it hurtles through the sky of the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre over the course of eighty tense minutes.

First produced in 2013, and presented here by Melbourne-based company Red Stitch Actors Theatre, this production of Grounded is riveting and mesmerising. While essentially the story of a fighter pilot in the US military who becomes pregnant and is reassigned to piloting drones, this is merely the set-up for Brant’s play. What Brant explores – and what the production, directed by Kirsten von Bibra, does so well – is show the psychological effects of this relocation on the pilot (she is never named), how hard it is for her to readjust to the mindset and pressures of remote-control drone operation.

Pride and prejudice: Disney's The Lion King

Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will
do any man’s heart good to hear me; I will roar,
that I will make the duke say ‘Let him roar again,
let him roar again.’
 – Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream [I.2.66-9]

Eight years ago, my year twelve English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of a film guaranteed to change the way we look at Shakespeare. In an empty coliseum in the dead of night, soldiers, dressed like figurines, poured into the ‘archetypal theatre of cruelty’ to the bold choric strains of a majestic fanfare. Horse-drawn chariots sat sidebyside with tanks and motorcycles, foot soldiers danced, their hands fused with their swords, and an old battle-wearied general addressed his people, cheered on by the echo of their ghostly cries. The film was Julie Taymor’s Titus, and that afternoon marked the beginning of many things for me, not least my fascination with Taymor’s work, both on stage and on screen.

In 1994, Disney’s thirty-second animated film opened in cinemas and set records instantly to become, twenty years later, the highest grossing hand-drawn animation in history. The film was The Lion King, and three years later, it roared onto the stage of the New Amsterdam theatre on New York’s Broadway as a musical, quickly becoming a critical and popular success, and spawning numerous concurrent productions internationally. Its director, Julie Taymor, had taken Disney’s beloved film and so thoroughly reimagined it for the stage that it was a beast in a class all of its own, without peer before or since. Where Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first foray into theatrical musicals based on their film, was described as ‘animated Broadway,’ Taymor’s envisioning of The Lion King was pure full-blooded theatre. No other director working today has so audaciously mixed theatrical styles and techniques, or used cinematic conventions on a stage so audaciously, that no matter how hard you try to resist it, the story still affects you every time because its magic is so ephemeral and so vibrantly alive, so vividly present that you cannot ignore it.

“Let me introduce to you:” How I met The Beatles

If you wanted to, you can pinpoint the day I started listening to music and looking at films. I mean really listening to music, obsessively, the same way I read books – trying to decode its mysteries and secrets, trying to work out why it makes me feel the way it does, trying to make sense of its sounds and melodies. Likewise with films, the way meaning and shots work together, how the disparate elements add to form the total (or not), how a film is made; how it all works.

July 2007, and I was meant to be writing an essay at school in study hall when I found out about Across The Universe, and… well, one thing led to another, and I found a trailer for it and fell in love with it – its colours, music, visuals, scope, diversity, sprawl. When it opened in Australia in November, I asked my two best friends if they’d like to see it with me, knowing they were huge Beatles fans, and so we went, and ‘everything changed’ that day, or so they say. From the film’s opening shot – a slow zoom in to Jude sitting on an empty windswept beach, as the waves fell upon the screen, intercut with archival images of protests and violence and revolutions; as the all frenetic agitated guitar of ‘Helter Skelter’ cut across it all, I remember thinking ‘so this is what it’s all about.’ The ‘it’ in question was the Beatles – their music, their lyrics, personas; their magic, their mystery, the phenomenon; their legacy. The film picked you up on “a wave of terrific Beatles songs” and catapulted you head-first through the decade of the Sixties – from the youthful innocence of the early days, to the experimentation and exuberance of the psychedelic era, to the violence and protests of Vietnam, to its ambiguous end. Two hours later, as the final strains of ‘All You Need Is Love’ faded over a girl standing on a rooftop, smiling amongst her tears, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ played and the credits rolled, it was hard not to sing along. There was one point, I think, when the three of us were singing along, and we left the cinema grinning like maniacs, bouncing on the tide of energy and music that was the film.

‘Do you have any of the Beatles’ music?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied, immediately ashamed of the fact.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re about to remedy that.’