Rock this ground: Shakespeare’s Globe’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is celebrating Shakespeare in the truest possible way: come in, drink beer, shout at the stage, come and go as you please and get involved.
– Emma Rice

This morning I realised I’ve seen a dozen or so versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the past thirteen years, either on stage, on video, or in a cinema. Without a doubt it is Shakespeare’s most evergreen play, in that its magic, beauty, strangeness and wonder never fades, and can withstand whatever a production throws at it. When Emma Rice was announced as the third artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London last year, I was immediately excited to see what she would produce. Now, eighteen months later, as her first production at the Globe comes to a close, the BBC decided to live-stream the final performance of Rice’s Dream to all and sundry; playing at 6.30pm BST, I pulled an all-nighter and sat up in bed watching it at 3am Australian-time, watching the darkness encroach around the Globe as the sky grew light outside my window. If her first Dream is any indication, under Rice’s leadership the Globe is set to transcend the heavens of invention, if it hasn’t already done so straight off the bat.

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.

Transfigured night: SUDS’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s perennial masterpieces – an effervescent concoction of magic, darkness, dreams, comedy, and love, it is the first Shakespeare play I studied at school, the first one I loved wholeheartedly, and certainly one of the best introductions to the Bard’s work, and a play for all ages. Presented here by SUDS (Sydney University’s Dramatic Society) in the Seymour Centre’s York theatre, this ‘Dream’ has been given a slight reworking - inspired by a queer reading of the play - which opens up new spaces within the four-hundred-year-old play and proves it can still be a fresh experience, even if this is not your first encounter with the play.