The Lovers

This giddy and joyous production is entertaining, lusty and lush.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s most widely performed play, and if the traditional version is like a test cricket match this is the 20/20 version.

First staged by the Bell Shakespeare Company in 2022, the Shake & Stir Theatre Company has taken it to the next level, resembling a Broadway production. 

During interval, patrons were snatching the program from my hands to find out who was behind the beautiful design (Isabel Hudson, Trent Suidgeest and David Bergman for the record).

The standard of the production, the culmination of 20 years of work by the Brisbane based Shake & Stir Theatre Company, is quite remarkable for a commercial musical which only has a short season in Sydney following a brief Festival outing in Brisbane.

The producers have their eyes on the world, and it has the feel of Six, in several respects particularly as they share the same cast size.

‘Love, Pop and Shakespeare’ is the opening number, with a giant AV screen projecting words and images.

It switches between feeling like a pop concert with actors singing into microphones then darting back to the narrative under a magical tree in a forest, or behind a curtain.

A dazzling effect is a giant love heart which drops down from the ceiling and has projected cheeky images of cast members interacting with actors on stage.

The original play has 20 human and fairy characters. Murphy has simplified this with Fairy Oberon (Stellar Perry) oozing cool, and mischief maker Puck (Jayme-Lee Hanekom) conspiring to re-direct the love trajectory of the four humans who spend the night in the forest.

There were some fireworks from the lovers. Mat Verevis as Lysander looked deliciously like a frightened deer when his lover Hermia (Loren Hunter) came to introduce him to the pleasures of the flesh for the first time.

Jason Arrow as Demetrius displayed just the right amount of cruelty in spurning Natalie Abbott as Helena.  Abbott triumphed in her solo ‘Chasing My Tail’ –  building on her strong performance in the original 2022 season.

The music is a mix of pop, through hip hop and soaring ballads. Having seen this musical before, the tunes returned as old friends. The six performers and five-piece band blended beautifully.

Some of the references are unashamedly aimed at a younger audience. The urban slang RUDTF is tweaked to be RUDTL – Are you down to love.

A theme of the production is harking back to a time when you didn’t have to swipe right to find romance.  The actors navigate love, rejection and then a magic potion which alters their reality.

Murphy makes the point that the trials and tribulations of finding your true of love are in many respects no different to what lovers had to navigate in Shakespeare’s day.

The Lovers is a feast for the eyes and ears.

David Spicer

Photogapher: Joel Devereux

Editor Neill Litchfield was also enamoured of The Lovers

When did you first fall in love with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

As a kid I saw Max Reinhardt’s 1935 movie on TV (was it on Bill Collins’ Golden Years of Hollywood?). The top-notch silver screen cast included Mickey Rooney, James Cagney, Olivia Di Havilland and Joe E. Brown.

Even studying an abridged junior high school version in the late 1960s couldn’t spoil ‘The Dream’ for me.

Then in the early 1973, in first year uni, I was fortunate enough to catch Peter Brook’s revolutionary production, highlighting so many of the sexy bits which we schoolboys had been protected from in that sanitized schools’ version.

What a huge revelation!

I went right back the next night.

My love affair with the timeless comedy continued last night, thanks to Laura Murphy’s cheeky, sexy new pop/rock musical, The Lovers, which deftly prunes Shakespeare’s play back the core love story of the four young Athenians, plus a couple of fairies (those two performers also doubling up as needed to provide some narrative framing). On top of a terrific score, Murphy adds her own contemporary spin and variations to the tale, and its outcome.

I’m sure many others among you will remember The Popular Mechanicals at Belvoir, then elsewhere in the 1980s, when Keith Robinson and Tony Taylor made the exact opposite trim of the play’s parallel plots, splitting off Shakespeare’s farcical amateur acting troupe to create an evening of low comedy mayhem.

Four hundred and thirty years on, Shakespeare’s play, both as a whole and in its various parts, continues to surprise and delight audiences, and inspire brand new theatrical visions.

Neil Litchfield