| As Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
is set in a forest of moonlight and magic, what better place to
see a magical production of it than in
the greenery of the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park on a balmy
summer night, with real moonlight.
Director Ian Talbot and his cast do the play proud, as
the young lovers suffer the “course of true love” not running
“smooth,” the mature, engaged couple, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta,
coolly await their nuptials, and the married couple, Titania and
Oberon, wrangle. Titania’s fairies and Oberon’s jester Puck are
childish imps, fun-loving pranksters, and providing pure delight
are the town mechanicals, workmen who resort to the forest to
rehearse a play they will present before the Duke, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” that would be “tragical”
but ends up “comical.”
As Bottom, the self-styled star of the mechanicals
(and of this production), John Hodgkinson is perfect.
In this early play, Bottom is probably the first of Shakespeare’s
great comic characters. He
exudes self-confidence, and nothing fazes him.
Whether enacting Pyramus or wearing an ass’s head, he is
a model of composure. Perfectly
at home sharing the rule of fairyland, he is as gracious as is
Theseus to subjects of the throne, asking Cobweb to bring him
a “honeybag” from a bee, or calling for the tongs and bones rather
than more sophisticated music.
He is e
is the only character to move effortlessly from city stalls to
woodland, to fairyland, to court, and he is at home in each milieu.
His gestures are just right, exaggerated yet graceful,
and his reactions are sympathetic as well as comic when his ass’s
head appears and later disappears.
Meanwhile, in fairyland, Puck (Gerard Carey)
has a great time stirring things up for the invaders of the greenwood,
Lysander (Dominic Marsh) and Hermia (Sheridan Smith), who  elope
there to escape her father’s (Andrew Melville) hostility to their
marriage and his invocation of the death penalty or a nunnery
for her. Her father’s preferred
suitor, Demetrius (David
Partridge), also turns up in the woodland, drawn there when Hermia,
who spurns him, tells Helena,
whom he spurns, of their plans.
The two men are virtually interchangeable, as Lysander
points out to his wished-for father-in-law.
But they change and change again under the influence
of Oberon’s magic love-juice, while the two women need no magic
to remain faithful to their original love, Helena (Summer Strallen)
having formerly been engaged to Demetrius, who more lately has
been wooing Hermia. Believers in ‘all’s fair in love and war,’ the
two formerly close girlfriends engage in insults when both men,
afflicted with love-juice, switch from loving Hermia to declare
their undying passion for Helena.
Farce ensues as first the women and then the men come to
blows.
Ian Talbot, artistic director of the Open Air,
gives us a most imaginative interpretation of the fairies.
He sees them as “spiky and frightened” and rather like
the Lost Boys in “Peter Pan,” which he also has directed.
When Selena Chilton appears as the first fairy, with shaved
head and in Edwardian underwear, it might be off-putting to audience
members expecting beautiful winged creatures dancing in to Mendelssohn’s
music, but the fairies’ fun and pranks win us over.
The costumes by Kit Surrey are charmingly Edwardian,
the women in long white dresses, most of the men in uniform, and
the workmen dressed for their play in garb that adds to the humor
of their amateur performance as ‘tragic’ lovers, the wall, the
man in the moon plus dog, and a lion whose roar is more of a purr.
The set needs only a green hill for Puck’s hiding place
and the chamber of amorous Titania (Sirine Saba), otherwise taking
advantage of the natural shrubbery for entrances and exits.
The hilarity of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in which
everything that can go wrong, does so, is a tribute both to Mr.
Talbot’s inventive staging and to the excellent acting of Bottom’s
supporting cast: Timothy Kightley, Thomas Aldridge, David Burrows,
Leo Conville, and Michael Medwin. And when the laughter dies, and the couples
depart, Puck and the singing fairies conclude a magical evening.
“The
Taming of the Shrew” is a delightful production of this early
comedy, replete with turnabouts as identities are changed, poses
are dropped, and love conquers all, ending with fireworks and
a joyful wedding dance. Director Rachel Kavanaugh resolves the accusation
of sexism leveled at the play over the past couple of decades:
that Petruchio is a swaggering bully whose tactics force Katherina
into submission. George Bernard Shaw agreed, and more lately,
at least one critic walked out, while on another occasion, the
audience booed Kate’s final speech.
Director
Kavanaugh solves this by having the pair fall in love at their
very first meeting. She
also gives depth to the principal characters, Petruchio
and Katherina, by taking them seriously as real people, not
cartoons in a farce. Early
on, before they meet, each is depicted as an outsider, isolated
from the jovial, conventional citizens of Padua. She alerts
us to Petruchio’s first lines, explaining to his friend Hortensio
that he has arrived from Verona because “Antonio my father is deceased,/ And I have
thrust myself into this maze.” He is wandering, looking for
a way out of the “maze,” wearing a black armband on the jacket
of his suit when his travels take him to the public square in
Padua,
depicted as a small Italian town in the thirties. Designer Kit Surrey modeled the set on the square
of the small town in Sicily
where Michael Corleone hides from vengeful assassins in The Godfather.
The
townspeople see nonconformist Katherina as a “shrew,” a nagging
woman outside their prescribed pattern for women, like submissive
Patient Griselda. Katherina’s childish behavior, yelling, biting,
striking, is to gain attention, especially that of her father,
Baptista, because he favors his younger daughter, Bianca. She is advised by him to have nothing to do
with her elder sister, who has just tied Bianca’s hands: “Poor
girl, she weeps./ Go ply thy needle, meddle not with her.” Katherina
turns on her father: “Nay, now I see/ She is your treasure,
she must have a husband;/ I must dance barefoot on her wedding
day.” Blonde, mincing Bianca has three suitors; no man will
go near Katherina, even for the large dowry offered by Baptista,
who will not allow Bianca to marry until someone – anyone –
marries Katherina. Enter Petruchio.
As impressively played by John Hodgkinson, Petruchio
is a man of the world, despite his detachment from it; he has
been a soldier, he tells the suitors who encourage him to ask
for Katherina’s hand, to clear their way to Bianca. When
they warn him against a shrew, he replies,
“Have I not heard great ordnance in the field…Have I
not in a pitched battle heard/ Loud ‘larums, neighing steeds,
and trumpets clang?/ And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue?”
Nor is he put off by the wound to the head of Hortensio,
injured by Katherina when he tried to teach her the lute.
As Petruchio waits to meet her, he improvises a course
of action, to praise her, despite her behavior - - and takes
a few swigs from a small silver flask to bolster up his courage
(a good directorial touch). Sirine Saba’s Kate cares nothing about her appearance,
unkempt long hair and bulky overalls, a woman who holds everyone
in low esteem, including herself.
To
have Petruchio facing away when they meet, is a clever directorial
touch, for when he turns, and they see each other, it is apparent
from the deft acting of both, that this is love at first sight.
The banter and the physical horseplay that follow, including
her biting and his restraining embrace, take on added significance. And in Shakespeare’s comedies (as well as “Romeo
and Juliet”), love is always at first sight. Here, Lucentio, also a visitor to Padua, falls in love
with Bianca when he first sees her, and to gain access to her,
changes clothes with his servant to pose as a scholarly teacher.
As
their first volcanic meeting ends, Petruchio departs for Venice to arrange for the wedding on Sunday, and his final
kiss has its desired effect, for we next meet Kate in her wedding
dress. It is the skill of both the actors, Mr. Hodgkinson
and Ms. Saba, that maintains the growing regard for each other
that underlies the rocky road from the wedding, for which he
turns up in a dress, through the honeymoon in Venice, where
she, deprived of food and sleep, realizes that his outrageous
behavior mirrors hers, to the last scene, where they display
their mature love. Delivered to the assembled company at Bianca’s
wedding feast, Kate’s final speech, therefore, is a kind of
love paean, directed to Petruchio, and it shines with joy and
love.
The
cast are uniformly good, especially the trio of suitors to Bianca,
Dominic Marsh as Lucentio, James Wallace as Hortensio, and Andrew
Melville as Gremio, the older man who, in this materialistic
society, lists his possessions with pride, only to have them
capped by David Partridge’s Tranio, posing as Lucentio.
As the worried father Baptista, Timothy Kightley is impressive,
and Sheridan Smith is a pretty and preening Bianca.
Most of the cast handle the dialogue well, so that it
is fully understandable, a virtue that contributes to the popularity
of Shakespeare performances at the Open Air Theatre. (Performance schedule and tickets: www.openairtheatre.org. )
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