REVIEW: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, RST, Stratford-upon-Avon gives you a lovely glimpse into the character of the Cotswolds, whether that is through history, landscape, architecture, local life or a memorable day out.
Read on for the details, from Theatre Reviews, Midsummer Night and Dream to the reasons this place or story continues to add to the charm and character of the Cotswolds.
25/02/2016
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ By Colin Davison @IamColinDavison
It’s billed as “a play for the nation” using more than 650 amateurs and children alongside professional actors as the show moves around the country.
It’s billed as “a play for the nation” using more than 650 amateurs and children alongside professional actors as the show moves around the country.
It’s an enterprise is to be applauded, sadly rather more in the ambition than in the execution. But the fault lies squarely with the professionals for a show lacking imagination and devoid of magic.
Director Erica Whyman has set the piece in a run-down, stripped-down, post-war 1940s theatre. Centre-stage stands a grand piano on whose strings the enchanted Ayesha Dharker’s Titania and various Bottoms are laid.
Some fairy bower! I kept wondering if the lid would crash down, ending their miserable ordeal.
Fourteen amateur companies will appear as the Mechanicals, Shakespeare’s send-up of an amateur company. It was the turn of The Nonentities from Kidderminster when I saw the play, and their splendid well-drilled performance suggests they have nothing to fear from comparison with their card-carrying colleagues.
Chris Clarke played Bottom with a passion, and Alex Powell almost stole the show as the comic/tragic Thisbe.
Most of the professional cast were also new to the RSC and some of the verse-speaking was as clunky as the few pieces of stage scenery.
Rising above the ordinary, as fairy kings should, was Chu Omambala, an imperious and tender Oberon.
The excellent Chris Nayak played Demetrius as a soldierly contrast to Jack Holden’s Lysander, a civvy one suspects, who would be as easily blown off course by a puff of wind as by the scent of a magic flower. Their cleverly choreographed struggles in the forest were a joy.
I found Lucy Ellinson a rather irritatingly arch Puck, whereas Jon Trenchard, best known for his work with the Propeller company, finds more inventive humour in his late two-minute appearance as Philostrate than there had been in pages of earlier comic scenes.
Local schoolchildren are brought on to play fairies. Admirable though this may be, and ardently though they spoke their barely audible lines, the ring-a-roses routine reminded me painfully of school plays.
Those who put children on the stage should be prosecuted with the same vigour, I felt, as those who put them up chimneys.
The play continues to Saturday 5 March, then tours until June, then returns to Stratford until Saturday 16 July. Tickets: 01789 403492 and online.
Colin Davison
Director Erica Whyman has set the piece in a run-down, stripped-down, post-war 1940s theatre. Centre-stage stands a grand piano on whose strings the enchanted Ayesha Dharker’s Titania and various Bottoms are laid.
Some fairy bower! I kept wondering if the lid would crash down, ending their miserable ordeal.
Fourteen amateur companies will appear as the Mechanicals, Shakespeare’s send-up of an amateur company. It was the turn of The Nonentities from Kidderminster when I saw the play, and their splendid well-drilled performance suggests they have nothing to fear from comparison with their card-carrying colleagues.
Chris Clarke played Bottom with a passion, and Alex Powell almost stole the show as the comic/tragic Thisbe.
Most of the professional cast were also new to the RSC and some of the verse-speaking was as clunky as the few pieces of stage scenery.
Rising above the ordinary, as fairy kings should, was Chu Omambala, an imperious and tender Oberon.
The excellent Chris Nayak played Demetrius as a soldierly contrast to Jack Holden’s Lysander, a civvy one suspects, who would be as easily blown off course by a puff of wind as by the scent of a magic flower. Their cleverly choreographed struggles in the forest were a joy.
I found Lucy Ellinson a rather irritatingly arch Puck, whereas Jon Trenchard, best known for his work with the Propeller company, finds more inventive humour in his late two-minute appearance as Philostrate than there had been in pages of earlier comic scenes.
Local schoolchildren are brought on to play fairies. Admirable though this may be, and ardently though they spoke their barely audible lines, the ring-a-roses routine reminded me painfully of school plays.
Those who put children on the stage should be prosecuted with the same vigour, I felt, as those who put them up chimneys.
The play continues to Saturday 5 March, then tours until June, then returns to Stratford until Saturday 16 July. Tickets: 01789 403492 and online.
Colin Davison
