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A Midsummer Night
With three nights in London while showing ‘good old London town’ to Boomer newbies, a single night of theater seemed enough. Our time in London was short, sandwiched between a longer choral stay in Canterbury and an excursion to rural Yorkshire. Other London evenings would be for restoration and restaurants, recovering from the walking marathon that London can be in attempting to see it all in limited time. Given the cultural heft of Shakespeare and the longer daylight hours, a night at the open-air Globe Theater seemed promising. How could ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ not be perfect for a summer play on a clear evening?
I should have studied the website more closely.
In contrast to the Hollywood-Broadway divide in the US, British actors act for both stage and screen, so one fun aspect of London theater is recognizing an actor from television or movies. A few years ago, we saw the vicar of the Downtown Abbey church, who officiated at all the Crawley daughter weddings, preside over the courtroom in Agatha Christie’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution.’ We saw the paramour of Downton’s Lady Edith, Mr. Gregson (played by Charles Edwards), appear as Richard II. And decades ago, I saw Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ played by three Redgraves—Vanessa, Lynn, and Jemma. But the fact that Mark Rylance (‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bridge of Spies’) and James Norton (‘Grantchester’ and ‘Happy Valley’) were both playing this summer in London’s West End did not dissuade me from my naïve notions of the superiority of the Bard by the Thames for our summer evening.
I should have studied the website more closely.
The evening started with promise at Swan, the restaurant adjacent to and owned by the Globe, with views across the Thames to St. Paul’s dome, reassuring in the early evening sun. The hallway on the way to the loo was lined with photos from previous Globe productions – British stalwart Jonathan Pryce as ‘The Merchant of Venice’ being one picture I spotted —heightening the anticipation for the play to come.
The play got started with brasher music than I had anticipated—nothing fanciful or faerie-like. No flutes or recorders or acoustic guitar but sax, trumpet, and drums playing dissonant chords. The players whooped and swirled and stomped. A one to two-foot gape in the center of the skirts revealed knee boots—the better to stomp with. My ears are fine and I found it hard to understand what they were saying, an important part of keeping up with the topsy-turvy plot of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for us non-literature aficionados. Perhaps standard British pronunciation was eschewed for something more ‘accessible’ but less clear in the fourth row.
What I had not anticipated was the extra layer of confusion of who was who because of gender-bent casting. I read in the play’s program afterward that initial rehearsals took place under handwritten signs admonishing “resistance, struggle, and attack” and “warrior ferocity.” How better to attack a favorite Shakespearian romcom than to transform the central romance?
Hermia was played capably by a young woman with dwarfism, which meant that her beau Lysander, played by a non-binary woman, had to kneel to embrace her. The confusion went further: Hermia’s father, whose legal demand that she wed whom he picks [creating the central conflict], was played by a woman. Women are fathers all the time, don’t you know? Way to stick it to the patriarchy. Nick Bottom was played by a woman. Peter Quince was played by a woman. No longer unusual, the sprite Puck was played by a woman. Only two men in the entire cast. Who needs them?
Confused and feeling more preached at than played to, we left disappointed at the interval. “Why could they not just play the play,” I kept thinking. It was they who were culturally misappropriating the weight of Shakespeare — using a Western staple to say what they wanted. A less subversive ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ with its potions and folly turning love interests upside down and inside out might have as its theme, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” as uttered by Lysander early in the play. This production seemed to grab its theme from a Pride T-shirt I recently saw: “Defy, disarm, dismantle.”
The Bard is no longer safe at the Globe.
Published in Entertainment
The original plays were all-male cast, which reflected the predominant culture of the time, I suppose. The modern casting seems to reflect only a small minority opinion. When one goes to a place expecting at least a somewhat authentic re-enactment it is disappointing to get someone’s supposedly clever modern version.
How very depressing. Hopefully it will appeal to the majority of theater-goers as it did to you, and will end up being played to empty seats.
I wonder if they’d cast a white woman as Othello? Or is that a bit too much “struggle”?
Several years ago I won tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream put on by Synetic Theater in Arlington, Virginia. Not knowing anything about that particular theater company, I thought, “Woohoo! Free Shakespeare!”
Apparently Synetic’s schtick, or angle, or whatever, is “silent Shakespeare”. As in, no spoken words in the performance.
I left after about 15 minutes.
I should have studied the website more closely.
🤮🤮🤮
The Junior Genfereis (10 and 15) and Mrs Genferei (forever 21) thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m sure the cast and direction thought they were doing something Important, but while doing their Important work it seems they enthusiastically and competently delivered the author’s words in a genuine attempt to entertain – and succeeded, at least with some.
Had I been able to attend, I would probably have been busy being annoyed at the attendant wokery, and I would have missed the truly important thing – Shakespeare.
Yes, I think that’s actually their objective. The whole thing is about “Look at meeeeee!” and presenting you with a spectacle so bizarre that there’s scarcely any bandwidth left over for thinking about the Bard.
I saw the Nottingham Playhouse/National Theatre’s live production of “The Madness of King George” in 2018 (live play shown worldwide at movie theaters). Mark Gattis as George was superb and the production was excellent, but I was distracted by the several women playing men’s roles, for no apparent reason that I could fathom. (I think the wokesters would ask: “Couldn’t they find a man for the job?” In the same way that they are asking why Bradley Cooper (not-a-Jew, and with a plastic nose extension), is playing Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.) Still, compared to A Midsummer Night’s Excrescence, King George was perfection itself.
Crimenutely. This reminds me of something the younger me thought was very funny (an example of English major undergraduate humor, so be warned) in which–at some sort of party–one of the professors (the future Mr. She, actually) and a graduate student invented a scenario where you filled a stadium with exactly the number of participants are there are words in all Shakespeare’s plays. Then, a person assigned each audience member, starting with the first word in the first play, a single word in sequence, all the way up to the last audience member, who was assigned the last word in the last play.
Then, the conductor dropped the baton and everyone spoke their word simultaneously, thereby performing all of Shakespeare’s plays simultaneously (and at the same time) in one second or less.
I guess you had to be there. 🤣
That would be intolerable.
When I was in high school (late 1980s), we attended a production of Macbeth as Kabuki. It was long enough ago now that I recall very little about the show. What I do recall is that it was weird and hard to watch as Shakespeare.
Also from high school (but better) was Merchant of Venice set in pre-Castro Cuba. I recall very much enjoying the show. Nothing obviously weird or off-putting.
These desperate attempts to make Shakespeare relevant display a deep-seated belief that they are not, in and of themselves, relevant.
Idiots.