Molly Lyons as Titania & Craig Walker as Bottom
St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival off to first-rate start
Brockville Recorder & Times
By RONALD ZAJAC, Staff Writer
PRESCOTT -- Of all the Bard's plays staged at the Kinsmen Amphitheatre so far, this one is arguably the most apt.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, which opened the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival's fifth season on Saturday, is a romp through Shakespeare's "Green World."
It's a play that deserves to be performed outdoors, making the waterfront amphitheatre an ideal setting for it. (Friday's preview performance was indeed staged outdoors, although Saturday night's opener, given the weather, was held inside the festival's nearby tent. On the upside, the tent was full.)
The "Green World," a term coined by the late critic Northrop Frye, is the wilderness to which many of Shakespeare's comic heroes escape.
Under the trees, potentially tragic lovers like Lysander and Hermia are governed not by strict Athenian law, but by whimsical, magical beings who lure them astray with their tricks, yet have conscience enough to make everything right by sunrise.
The Prescott production not only captures the sheer joy of Shakespeare's best-known comedy, but uses the "Green World" magic of the amphitheatre to full advantage. Characters sweep down on the audience from above, while music from an unseen performer wafts over the trees during the woodland spirits' games.
This is, truly, an enchanting way to spend a midsummer's night.
It's also a worthy rendition of the quintessential Shakespearean comedy.
Director Steve Scott has remained faithful to the text and the performers, many of them festival regulars by now, do it justice.
In particular, leads Ross Neill and Molly Lyons bring the right mixture of severity and comedy to the roles of the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania, while Michael MacDonald, whose talent for physical comedy is by now well known, is an excellent choice for the mischievous Puck.
Meanwhile, the four benighted lovers (Amanda Levencrown as Hermia, Dorian Foley as Lysander, Lisa Benner as Helena and Dan De Jaeger as Demetrius), whose confused trip through the Green World is the core of the play, are also well cast.
In particular, Benner, the delicate Hero in last year's Much Adoe About Nothing, and Levencrown, who gives a somewhat coarser edge to Hermia, make for interesting echoes of the play's two other female archetypes: the fairy queen and the amazon.
And while the St. Lawrence troupe does it for budgetary reasons, casting the same two actors for the Theseus-Hippolyta and Oberon-Titania pairings conveys the message, first delivered with a similar twin-pairing in Peter Brook's famous 1970 staging, that the worlds of the mortals and fairies mirror each other.
But for comedy of the side-splitting variety, enter the "rude mechanicals," the Elizabethan term for lower-class labourers, whose hilarious play-within-a-play, and the attempt to rehearse it, provide the real from-the-gut laughter.
All six of these characters provide the play's comedic climax with their mis-staged tragedy that serves as a satire on the potentially tragic love that has just been healed in the "Green World."
In particular, Craig Walker, as Bottom, takes on the challenge of being unwittingly elevated to main character status when Puck gives him an ass's head, while Oberon magically contrives to have Titania fall in love with him.
And here we find this play's main flaw, likely the bane of every Midsummer Night's Dream director: what to do about that ass's head.
It's a tricky dilemma. Having a character run around with a donkey's head without knowing it is the stuff of pure physical comedy, yet at the same time, the audience needs to see that confusion in the actor's face. The result, as in this case, is often a head with ass's ears, but little else to suggest a donkey Walker compensates for this forgivable problem with all the facial expressiveness Bottom demands, and throws in his own deliberately asinine laugh to boot.
This Midsummer Night's Dream comes with arguably more double-entendre than other renditions, most of it delivered through physical comedy, and there are brief moments when the physical comedy distracts the viewer from the text.
But then, one could argue this is how the Bard intended it, as Puck looks on and observes: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
The Shakespeare festival's "Summer of Love" continues Wednesday with the opening of Romeo and Juliet on Wednesday.
· Published in Section A, page 3 in the Monday, July 16, 2007 edition of the Brockville Recorder & Times.
Brockville Recorder & Times
By RONALD ZAJAC, Staff Writer
PRESCOTT -- Of all the Bard's plays staged at the Kinsmen Amphitheatre so far, this one is arguably the most apt.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, which opened the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival's fifth season on Saturday, is a romp through Shakespeare's "Green World."
It's a play that deserves to be performed outdoors, making the waterfront amphitheatre an ideal setting for it. (Friday's preview performance was indeed staged outdoors, although Saturday night's opener, given the weather, was held inside the festival's nearby tent. On the upside, the tent was full.)
The "Green World," a term coined by the late critic Northrop Frye, is the wilderness to which many of Shakespeare's comic heroes escape.
Under the trees, potentially tragic lovers like Lysander and Hermia are governed not by strict Athenian law, but by whimsical, magical beings who lure them astray with their tricks, yet have conscience enough to make everything right by sunrise.
The Prescott production not only captures the sheer joy of Shakespeare's best-known comedy, but uses the "Green World" magic of the amphitheatre to full advantage. Characters sweep down on the audience from above, while music from an unseen performer wafts over the trees during the woodland spirits' games.
This is, truly, an enchanting way to spend a midsummer's night.
It's also a worthy rendition of the quintessential Shakespearean comedy.
Director Steve Scott has remained faithful to the text and the performers, many of them festival regulars by now, do it justice.
In particular, leads Ross Neill and Molly Lyons bring the right mixture of severity and comedy to the roles of the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania, while Michael MacDonald, whose talent for physical comedy is by now well known, is an excellent choice for the mischievous Puck.
Meanwhile, the four benighted lovers (Amanda Levencrown as Hermia, Dorian Foley as Lysander, Lisa Benner as Helena and Dan De Jaeger as Demetrius), whose confused trip through the Green World is the core of the play, are also well cast.
In particular, Benner, the delicate Hero in last year's Much Adoe About Nothing, and Levencrown, who gives a somewhat coarser edge to Hermia, make for interesting echoes of the play's two other female archetypes: the fairy queen and the amazon.
And while the St. Lawrence troupe does it for budgetary reasons, casting the same two actors for the Theseus-Hippolyta and Oberon-Titania pairings conveys the message, first delivered with a similar twin-pairing in Peter Brook's famous 1970 staging, that the worlds of the mortals and fairies mirror each other.
But for comedy of the side-splitting variety, enter the "rude mechanicals," the Elizabethan term for lower-class labourers, whose hilarious play-within-a-play, and the attempt to rehearse it, provide the real from-the-gut laughter.
All six of these characters provide the play's comedic climax with their mis-staged tragedy that serves as a satire on the potentially tragic love that has just been healed in the "Green World."
In particular, Craig Walker, as Bottom, takes on the challenge of being unwittingly elevated to main character status when Puck gives him an ass's head, while Oberon magically contrives to have Titania fall in love with him.
And here we find this play's main flaw, likely the bane of every Midsummer Night's Dream director: what to do about that ass's head.
It's a tricky dilemma. Having a character run around with a donkey's head without knowing it is the stuff of pure physical comedy, yet at the same time, the audience needs to see that confusion in the actor's face. The result, as in this case, is often a head with ass's ears, but little else to suggest a donkey Walker compensates for this forgivable problem with all the facial expressiveness Bottom demands, and throws in his own deliberately asinine laugh to boot.
This Midsummer Night's Dream comes with arguably more double-entendre than other renditions, most of it delivered through physical comedy, and there are brief moments when the physical comedy distracts the viewer from the text.
But then, one could argue this is how the Bard intended it, as Puck looks on and observes: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
The Shakespeare festival's "Summer of Love" continues Wednesday with the opening of Romeo and Juliet on Wednesday.
· Published in Section A, page 3 in the Monday, July 16, 2007 edition of the Brockville Recorder & Times.
Ross Neill as Oberon & Molly Lyons as Titania
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