A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Stooged Theatre. Shakespeare-on-Avon Festival, Gloucester (NSW). May 14 to 15. The Playhouse, Newcastle (NSW). July 28 to 31

As its name suggests, Stooged Theatre is a company with a passion for overt comedy. Its actors, mostly recent graduates from Newcastle University, also love Shakespeare.
In their previous productions of Shakespeare’s comedies, unsubtle humour sometimes undermined good ideas. But this Midsummer Night’s Dream showed how youthful enthusiasm can win over mature and demanding audience members.
Director Carl Young set the play in 1983, with Theseus a lawyer who has had to close Hippolyta’s cocktail bar for breaching a local government regulation. On the night of the closure, the play’s young lovers are mixing and matching in the bar and everyone is ignoring the woeful retro band, the Mechanicals, and its cocksure lead singer Nick Bottom.
When Theseus and Hippolyta announce wedding plans, the Mechanicals vie to be the entertainers at the marriage and put together a rock opera, Pyramus and Thisbe. They rehearse in a forest inhabited by hippie-style fairies whose king and queen, Oberon and Titania, are able to resolve other people’s problems through magic and drugs but can’t give themselves happiness.
Stooged added some contemporary dialogue but the bulk of the language was Shakespeare’s, and how well the two blended. All the members of the large cast were delightful but the Mechanicals, unlike their characters, were the stars, whether dancing through the forest singing a 1980s rock song or performing the Bard’s Pyramus and Thisbe “lyrics” to Christopher Harley’s music.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats will never be the same again after the song delivered by Stephanie Priest’s Snug in her role as the Lion. And the sight of Luke Standen’s tall Francis Flute, wearing a silver disco dress and red high heels as he reluctantly takes to the stage as heroine Thisbe, was something never to be forgotten.
Ken Longworth

Mat Lee (Peter Quince) remonstrates with Snug (Stephanie Priest) when The Mechanicals rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe in Stooged Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
 

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