A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is my favourite of all Shakespeare’s plays. You can
read me bang on about it on numerous
occasions on this blog. This will not be another one of them. This is the
fourth Dream I’ve seen this year, and
it was also the most eagerly awaited, and certainly one of the most anticipated
shows of this year. But as is often the case, the greater the expectations, the
harder the fall, and the more painful it is when it doesn’t work. And so it is
with Kip
Williams’ production for Sydney
Theatre Company.
This production
seems to owe a passing debt to Peter
Brook’s seminal 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production which toured the
world (you know the one I mean). But where Brook was rebelling – and quite
rightly – against the accumulated gossamer and Romantic notion of the Dream that had built up in theatrical
tradition since the 1800s, this production almost seems to want to shock us. In
seeking to draw out the darkness within Shakespeare’s play and to serve, in
some respects, as a corrective to the accumulated detritus around The Dream
both locally and abroad, Williams and his team create a psycho-sexual space for
the play to sit in and in doing so, impose a stark and austere world of lumpy
fairies, hooded figures, and semi-Lynchian images upon the text without too
much consideration for the textual engine at work beneath it. In doing so,
Williams removes the ability of the audience to dream, and thereby denies the
production its power; by being all intellectual and deliberate and calculated
about it, it can only come of as quite superficial.
