A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival
I absolutely loved Chris Abraham’s gender-bending take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival’s Festival Theatre in 2014. Graham Abbey’s sumptuous staging of the play in the Tom Patterson Theatre is utterly different and every bit as good, if not more so.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dizzying comedy that blends the travails of four Athenian teenagers in hormonal overdrive with a tale of jealousy in the fairy realm that rules the forest just outside town. Oh yes, there is also a gawdawful play-within-the-play mounted by rubes to please their duke on the occasion of his nuptials.
The Athens of this Dream has been transported to Victorian England. It’s one of those pointless transpositions that fortunately makes no particular difference to our enjoyment of the proceedings and gives costume designer Joshua Quinlan an opportunity to have some fun.
In a love quadrangle that could have inspired the J. Geil’s Band to write “Love Stinks,” Hermia (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) and Lysander (Jordin Hall) are madly in love. Trouble is she is supposed to marry Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie), who is beloved by Helena (Jessica B. Hill), whom he disdains.
I have never seen a production of Dream in which the raging hormones of teenagers in love flowed so fiercely. Abbey has encouraged his actors here to make what those in the trade call “big choices” and it works wonderfully. The actors are all good, though the women tend to outshine the men.
Endicott-Douglas has some wonderfully funny moments as the enraged, height-challenged Hermia and Hill gives a beautifully nuanced performance that neatly balances her almost feminist reading of the gender dynamics in play with her unbridled passion for Demetrius.
The fairy realm is well represented by a commanding André Sills as Oberon and Sara Topham, luminous as always, as his queen Titania.
Their fight over the custody of a changeling child sets in motion a comedy of errors involving the juice of a magical flower that, when dropped on the sleeping eyes of the unwary, causes the victim to fall madly in love with the first living creature they see on awakening.
The scenes in which the bewitched Titania fawns over the ass-ified Nick Bottom (of whom more anon) are pure comic gold.
As Puck, the “shrewd and knavish sprite” who serves the fairy king and creates no end of mischief, sometimes in error, sometimes just for the fun of it, Mike Nadajewski is nothing short of brilliant. Between them, Abbey and Nadajewski have elevated Puck to the status of a major character in Dream, which doesn’t happen in all productions.
The so-called “rude mechanicals” tend to present a problem for modern audiences and modern directors alike. They are often given short shrift.
But the subplot involving these simple working folk who put on a play to entertain Theseus (Evan Buliung) on the occasion of his marriage to Hippolyta (Ijeoma Emesowum) is one of the highlights of Shakespeare’s text.
Kudos to Abbey for leaning in and presenting the preparations for and production of “ The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby” pretty much as Shakespeare wrote them, albeit with some schtick-y additions. Of course, he has the assistance of accomplished farceurs like Michael Spencer-Davis as Nick Bottom, as well as Sara Dodd, Aaron Krohn, and Sara-Jeanne Hosie, not to mention Michael Man’s burst of piano virtuosity. They make the proceedings an unalloyed delight.
The physical production, with sets by Lorenzo Savoini, is one of the loveliest to have graced the stage of the Tom Patterson. A huge moon hangs over the stage, but thanks to projections by Normal Studio, it is full of surprises. Projections from overhead change the stage floor into a constantly changing canvas, now a forest floor, now waves of water. Sheer magic.
In addition to Victorian duds for the young lovers, Quinlan has conjured enchanting costumes of cobweb and gossamer for the lesser fairies. Thomas Ryder Payne provides a sweet melody for Oberon’s song of blessing on the house of Theseus and, even better, his sound design is blissfully muted.
This Midsummer Night’s Dream belongs indisputably to Abbey. Purists might carp that he has taken liberties and interpolated too much business, stretching one of the Bard’s shorter plays to almost three hours. Far more serious damage has been done to some of Shakespeare’s greatest works in previous seasons and I was having far too much fun to pick nits. I saw the last preview, which was filled with several school groups and they didn’t seem to have any problems with the length.
Abbey has been honing his skills as a director by assisting in Stratford productions like Breath of Kings, Twelfth Night, and The Alchemist and then stepping out on his own with a smashing Front Page. He has also has his own company, Groundling, which produced an inventive Winter’s Tale in Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre some seasons back. (Intriguingly, the programme tells us this production was “developed in collaboration with Groundling Theatre.”)
With this Midsummer Night’s Dream Abbey has come into his own as a superlative interpreter of Shakespeare. Let’s hope that incoming Artistic Director Jonathan Church, who acknowledges that Shakespeare is not his strong suit, will have the wisdom to tap him to direct another of the Bard’s works next season.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream continues at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre through September 26, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Stratford Festival website.
Footnote: At intermission, you might want to grab a drink and return to your seat to see Nadajewski’s Puck have some fun and games with the audience. It’s a lot of old school shtick but he does it so well.
For a complete index of reviews CLICK HERE.
Don’t miss another review or blog post! SUBSCRIBE HERE
