As one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has acquired a number of performance traditions: from fantastical fairies to elaborate forest set designs and that donkey costume, it’s likely that many audiences members will arrive with set expectations of any new production.
One of the reasons why Filter’s ‘remix and rework’ of the Dream works so well is the way in which it playfully manipulates these expectations. A mischievous quality is clear from the very start when Ed Gaughan’s Peter Quince welcomes the audience much in the manner of a stand up comic. Having asked ‘What do we know about Shakespeare’s play?’, his own answer is a mix of topical humour and a glib assessment of the text which includes a reference to The Matrix. When the curtain finally goes up, Hyemi Shin’s set is also not what we might have expected. Plain, off-white paper walls make up much of it, and there’s a small section of faded white tiles, complete with leaking filter system; the music and sound equipment of the ‘Mechanicals’ band’ is the most eye catching thing on stage. It’s about as far from the magical night-time world of the fairies as you’re likely to get.
Another unexpected element is the wilful miscasting. Ferdy Roberts’ Puck towers over his master, the smaller, impish and youthful Oberon, played by Jonathan Broadbent. This choice of performer, much like Oberon’s bright blue superhero costume, alters the power dynamics of the play in interesting ways; at times, the fairy king’s disruptive magic seems like the bad behaviour of a spoilt child.
On this stark, plain stage, it is Tom Haines’ excellent music and sound design that creates the atmosphere of the enchanted forest: twinkling fairy noises, night time crickets and magical sound effects encourage the audience to create their own mental images. Even Bottom’s transformation into a donkey is achieved through sound: the clip-clop of hooves and amplified ‘hee haws’. No costume change required.
Certain speeches of the play are set to music, the actors delivering their lines into microphones over the sound of the Mechanicals’ band. This does much to bring out the inherent musicality of the play’s verse and forms part of the production’s willingness to cut, play with and stray from Shakespeare’s text. Most notably in the Mechanicals’ scenes, modern English and contemporary references interweave surprisingly well with Shakespeare’s language.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a metatheatrical text whose climax is a play-within- a-play. This allowed Shakespeare to satirize his own industry. Filter’s production picks up and runs wild with this aspect of the play. Roberts’ Puck is a comically weary roadie-cum-back stage technician figure; with his Lyric Hammersmith T-shirt and tool belt, he bursts grumpily through the walls of the paper set, exposing a drab backstage area with chairs and microphones. When problems arise, Quince is obliged to call for company stage manager Claire Bryan to help him out. Both Oberon and Puck constantly have to remind other characters that they are supposed to be ‘invisible’. The cumulative effect is to make the audience feel that the entire play is, like the Mechanicals’ scenes, a shambolic rehearsal, and that they too dreamed ‘through parted eyes/When everything seems double’.
At times, this sense of the chaotic is taken too far, and the fourth wall broken a few too many times, in ways that detract from the play’s own momentum. However, in the main Filter has managed something rare: they have taken one of the best known of all Shakespeare’s plays and made from it something innovative, irreverent and unexpected.
Read the Exeunt interview with Filter’s Ferdy Roberts.
