Bard's Dream Works
Sunday, June 22, 2014
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| Titania, Naomi Wright & Bottom, Scott Bellis |
Last Saturday my eldest daughter Ale (a
teacher in Lillooet) and I went to Bard on the Beach’s opening performance of A
Midsummer’s Night Dream.
Happily my daughter’s perspicacity and good
ear prevented me from getting the wrong idea about lots of what I saw.
I will here admit that in my 71 years I
have not read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, James Joyce’s Ulysses
or George Elliot’s Middle March.
I will here admit that perhaps in my hazy
past I might have seen Mickey Rooney’s Puck and James Cagney as Bottom. I must
here admit that had you asked me before Saturday who was the ass, Puck or
Bottom, I would have not known..
But I do know that the famous overture to A
Midsummer’s Night Dream was written by a Jewish chap with an Italian-sounding name,
Bertholdy, when he was 17. Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn added Bertholdy so that
he might better be accepted by the then anti-Semitic German culture. Felix was born in 1809 and perhaps almost did
more for our concept of the Scots than Shakespeare did with Macbeth. Mendelssohn’s
Die Habriden Opus 26 put Scotland
sort of on the map.
There was very little Mendelssohn in this A
Midsummer’s Night dream thanks to that sonorously inventive couple Alessandro
Juliani and Meg Roe.
What I want to point out is that I may know
a lot more about Felix and next to nothing about Bottom and Puck. After asking
a few friends about this play I remembered a Spanish neighbour in our home in
Arboledas, Estado de Mexico. Gaspar and I never really chatted as he had a very
tall barda (wall) around his house. One day we did converse and we found out we
shared a love for science fiction. We exchanged books. I lent him Olaf
Stapledon’s Sirius and he gave me Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in Spanish. At the
time I was not too keen in reading in Spanish. A month later we sat down for
coffee and we discussed the two books. We did very well although I am convinced
neither of us had read a page.
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| Bottom - Scott Bellis |
I do believe then that A Midsummer’s Night
Dream may be one of Shakespeare’s least known.
I attempted to read the chapter on the play
by Harold Bloom in his marvelous Shakespeare – the Invention of the Human. I
got as far as figuring out that Bottom was the ass and not Puck.
The magic potion flower that gets this play
into its confusing motion is the mundane pansy (viola). I was ready to
criticize here that the folks (principally the director Dean Paul Gibson
(sometimes I find myself writing Harry Dean Stanton) had it all wrong as the
flower is not sniffed but its juice is squeezed on the sleepers closed eyelids
(Lysander (Chirak Naik), Demetrius (Daniel Doheny), and Titania (Naomi Wright).
My daughter set me straight as in the dialogue the action of squeezing the
juice is mentioned. So I have not criticisms to report. And that is just fine
as I am not a theatre critic at all.
It was theatre critic (the Georgia
Straight) Colin Thomas, who told me (he was most enthused) that he was ready to
wear Titania’s see-through outfit (her legs and thighs showed) so ably designed
by Costume Designer Mara Gottier. On a later date, outside the Arts Club
Theatre’s Granville Island Stage (the opening of Red Rock Diner) Thomas told me
he had no objection in my mentioning his name in this. Next to us was the
indomitable Bard publicist the spicy Cynnamon Schreinert who clued us in to the
fact that Titania’s outfit may have been inspired by a dress Cher
wore to the Oscars some years ago.
I must add that Mara Gottier’s rendering of
Oberon’s costume, it made Ian Butcher (who must be a tall man seem like he was
much taller man) look like a contemporary rendition of Bela Lugosi out to suck
blood. It was striking and I could not see why Puck, played by Kyle Rideout
found some sort of cozy tenderness to what seemed like his stern boss.
It is the latter coziness that methinks
would have had this play closed on its opening performance in my native Buenos Aires in the 50s and in many countries of the Middle East and Africa Dean Paul Gibson would find
himself behind bars.
If the average Vancouverite thinks that
this direction is daring he/she would be mistaken.
Through the years critics have lambasted the
play for suggesting that Oberon’s interest in Titania’s young ward was not
healthy. Others have attacked the possibility of bestiality (Titania falls for
Bottom whose head is an ass’s). And yet none of these critics may have opposed the
idea of sex with the opposite end of the equation the satyr (human from the
waist up).
And yet is was in 1840 that Queen Victoria
and her beloved Albert celebrated their first year’s wedding anniversary by
attending a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Charles Mathews at
Covent Garden. Mathews wife Elizabeth, known as Madame Elizabeth Vestris played
Oberon. It seems that Vestris had most shaply legs and as a woman she could not
display them. I wonder what the Queen might have opined. The custom of having a
female Oberon remained a standard in both the US
and England
until 1914.
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| Elizabeth Vestris as Titania - 1840 |
Now a few who might have arrived at this point might wander how this chap knows about this stuff. My wife Rosemary always reads the program before a theatrical production. I like to be innocent and surprised. But when I get home I get into my bible, the Harold Bloom. But I also have Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare For All Time which I purchased a few months ago as a Champlain Height Branch reject/ withdrawn of the Vancouver Public Library for $1.50 ($1.00 for novels).
In this my first ever A Midsummer’s Night
Dream I can report that the music is excellent, the dancing is top notch and
the actors are all superb. Add to this that the whole play will have you
roaring with laughter for most of the night. But is that enough?
No.
Upon reading Bloom I found out that only
Falstaff is more intelligent, witty and good than Bottom. Bloom further
informed me that this play is one of the few that Shakespeare wrote from
scratch without borrowing from anybody. He added that much of the dialogue is
superb. And finally don’t let anybody tell you about the marvelous Puck. Kyle
Rideout is all that. But the prize goes to Scott Bellis. He steals the show
even over the prancing Allan Morgan’s Starveling, suitably accessorized bye a
little white mechanical lap dog.
The play within the play, there are two
others in Shakespeare, in Hamlet and in Love's Labour’s Lost, in this production
is hilarious and worth the price of admission. The mechanicals, Quince (played
by an almost straight and calm Bernard Cuffling), Snug, (Allan Zinyk as a very
funny inoffensive lion), Flute (Haig Sutherland who plays a woman to
perfection), Snout (Andrew McNee who just returned from Hadrian’s
Wall for inspiration) and the prancing Alan Morgan as Starveling. But
again it is Bottom (Scott Bellis) who shines here. The women, particularly
Hermia (Claire Hesselgrave), Helena (Sereana Malani), Titania (Naomi Wright)
and Philostrate (Louisa Jojic) are just fine. Shakespeare this time around
showered the men with better lines.
