Outrageous and uproarious, the production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream by Actors From The London Stage is a highly physical and sexual rendition of the Bard’s fantastic and relentless depiction of human desire. Performed by only five actors, the show approaches Shakespeare’s fantasy in the light of epic theatre and Commedia dell’Arte, combining Brechtian techniques such as minimal sets and props, actors changing costumes and roles onstage, with elements of physical comedy such as slapstick, mime, and farce. The five actors execute Shakespeare’s lines with great energy and artistry, demonstrating considerable physical and vocal versatility and virtuosity. The performance, orchestrated entirely by the actors rather than ornamented by grand directorial concept, releases the raw, brute force of language and body but reduces psychological depth and emotional realism. The forthright, one-dimensional characterizations, on one hand, flatten the architecture of the storyline, but on the other, increase the absurdity and the warlike cacophony of the events onstage.
In A Midsummer’s Night Dream, love and war are seldom separable; a lover and a tyrant are hardly distinguishable. The only couple who seem not to fight with or over each other are Theseus, the Duke of Athens who was notorious for abducting and abandoning women (act 2. scene 1. lines 77-80), and his new captive Hippolyta, the Amazon queen who has lost both her nation and herself to the conqueror. Framed by the two’s upcoming marriage, bonded by Theseus’s military victory and political dominance, the play resolves conflicts and restores balance through plots of conquest, chance, and confusion. When the Athenian lovers eventually leave the woods of entangling paths and puzzles for the city of Athens and order, the Duke describes them as rivals and enemies (act 4. scene 1. lines 139-42) and later compares love to madness (act 5. scene 1. line 4-8). After all, Cupid’s arrows are weapons and the love juice is poison. Characterized by excessive verbal and physical abuse, power plays, and psychological manipulation, all the couples in this play are, to some degree, tyrants in reality and lunatics in fantasy.
Although ending with marriages and dance, A Midsummer’s Night Dream is nonetheless a crude joke on relationship and love, in which friends become enemies, parents persecutors, and lovers betrayers. If done seriously and realistically, the play may cause no less disturbance than A Doll’s House did on Ibsen’s original audience. Artists and writers sometimes mitigate the dark and heavy motifs with a light touch to make them more suitable for audiences. To some extent, children’s stories and fairy tales are an anthology of human horrors and worries; comedies and humor are a collection of mistakes and misfortunes. Beneath the mask of fantasy and burlesque, A Midsummer’s Night Dream is indeed an erotic nightmare where violence appears as love, love as madness, and madness as dream. According to Freud, dream is fueled by a series of primal impulses and sexual desires. In a sense, this midsummer’s night dream depicted by Shakespeare is one of the wildest erotic fantasies, saturated with allusions to sexual politics, violence, and perversions including masochism and bestiality. AFTLS’s blatantly cheerful, stormily farcical performance neither overlooks nor overstates the play’s sexual subtexts, evoking laughter without provoking discomfort from the audience. In addition, the actors’ lighthearted portrayal of the dark qualities of the play may also do justice to the original spirit indicated in the script. As implied in Act V, A Midsummer’s Night Dream is a concord of discord righted at the very end, a comedy of tragedy reversed to provoke tears through laughter (act 5. scene 1. line 58-70). “So musical a discord, such sweet thunder” (act 4. scene 1. line 115), the boisterous performance of AFTLS vocalizes Shakespeare’s text of antithesis and reversals, and materializes the aesthetics of disparity and inharmony.
The production’s dramatic use of actors assuming multiple roles, though overwhelming, is more than just gimmicking, and surprisingly suitable for the context of this play. The mobility of roles and partners not only foregrounds the characters’ love triangles, but also highlights the fragility of relationship, the fickleness of desire, and the fluidity of dream. The production’s casting device thus serves as Gestus, a Brechtian technique that helps deliver the essential messages of the text. Additionally, characters performed by the same actor may also strengthen theatrical and thematic significance by foregrounding power relationships and plot structure. In this production, for example, Samuel Collings plays both Lysander and Oberon, while Claire Redcliffe plays both Hermia and Titania. The quarrel and reconciliation between the fairy king and queen foreshadow the relationship dynamics between the Athenian lovers. Another example, the doublings of Lysander and Flute, played by Samuel Collings, and Demetrius and Bottom, played by Chris Donnelly, juxtapose the bitter fight between Lysander and Demetrius with the sweet passion between Thisbe (Flute) and Pyramus (Bottom). The resulting parallelism and contrast help reveal a pervasive theme of A Midsummer’s Night Dream: the transformation and reversal of character relationships and power. Theatrical and thoughtful, such a casting device, however, has one major drawback: the lack of absence due to the limited number of performers. Interestingly, no father is present in the final wedding scene — Egeus and the parents originally included in Pyramus and Thisbe are all missing from the text, while at the same time Hermia and Helena remain completely silent. On one hand, the disappearance of vocal fathers symbolizes the overthrow of their authority. On the other, the silence of daughters may suggest that “sovereignty” (act 1. scene 1. line 82) over women changes hands from fathers to husbands. In a sense, the production fails to present absence, which is equally important in this play as “presenting presence”.
In addition to Gestus, another Brechtian element embodied in the AFTLS production would be the onstage audience. During the show, the actors rest and prepare their scenes upstage, where they sit on a row of chairs as if watching both the audience and the events onstage. This design corresponds to the play-within-a-play structure in Act V, where a group of people (audience) watching another group of people (actors as audience) watching a play (actors as actors). The arrangement of onstage observers and commentators in both text and performance increases the dimension of storytelling, while it also breaks dramatic illusion by blurring the boundaries between stage and audience, fantasy and reality. A mirror that reflects the nature of theatre, the arrangement not only reminds the audience members that they are in fact watching a show, but also invites them to make judgements about the actions onstage.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream is a funhouse mirror of dramatic illusion, a parody of reality, a “shadow” created by the playwright’s and players’ imagination to be corrected by the audience’s (act 5. scene 1. line 208-9). The Brechtian aspect of this play becomes especially clear in the subplot of Pyramus and Thisbe, where the representational characters, namely, Prologue, Wall, and Moonshine are introduced. Interestingly, Snout, originally cast as Pyramus' father, now presents Wall; Quince, originally Thisbe’s father, now Prologue; and Starveling, originally Thisbe’s mother, now Moonshine. In other words, the characters transform into their own symbols and Gestus. It turns out that the missing parents are not missing, but replaced. They are represented instead of presented. Stepping out of characters and addressing the audience directly, these “impersonated props and scenery” disassemble the very form and structure of dramatic illusion and scenic imagination.
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