A Midsummer Night's Dream - Waterside Theatre, Sale

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays as it is so cleverly written and (when it is performed well) can be a hilarious comedy.  The story portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. It features royalty, magical woodland fairies and a band of hilarious travelling players. 

The company was made up of only eight actors and the rapport between cast members was a treat to watch as they genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves in the scenes as fairies and travelling players. However, the royal scenes are typically low key within the writing of the play but can be a lot of fun when it comes to the love triangle of the young Athenians.  This production sadly lacked the energy in these scenes but made up for it with their fairies and travelling players scenes. They all had great energy and stage presence but the stand out performer of the evening was Zachary Price in his role of Nick Bottom, the travelling player.  Price’s portrayal of Nick Bottom was brilliant and the play within the play, during act two had the audience howling with laughter. 

There was a real sense of authenticity about Chapterhouse Theatre Company’s production, which was reminiscent of the Globe theatre’s staging.  They were not trying to be clever or to apply anything new to the theatricality of the story but to tell it the way William Shakespeare himself would have wanted it to be told, completely unedited.  The costume design by Pearl Constance was a testament to this and was lovely.  With authentic Elizabethan costumes across the variety of different characters: from royalty to fairies, the costumes were elaborate and yet the backstage changes were swift and smoothly executed to portray up to thirty different roles.  The fairy costumes were colourful and successfully represented the names of the roles beautifully, helping the performers to embody the movement of the magical creatures extremely well.  This contrasted nicely with the oversized costumes of the traveling players, creating a sense of stupidity and the opulent, rich colours of the royals to embody their authority.

The negatives in this production were partly due to setting.  Like many of Chapterhouse’s productions, this was meant to be an open air production, however this was performed in an indoor auditorium; complete with lights and sound. The set design was bulky and cartoonlike; features which would have lent themselves very nicely to being in the open air, against a backdrop of nature, felt over the top in an indoor theatre space. Another weakness was the music and singing: much of the fairies’ dialogue was sung and so the singers had a recorded accompaniment but they often felt under rehearsed or even improvised and there is no credit in the programme for the composer, so I wonder if this is the case?

Perhaps it was the fact that the production coincided with England’s third World Cup match or because of the baking hot June weather which we are experiencing but the theatre was at less than half of its 350 capacity, which was a real shame.  Of those who were there, it was a pleasure to see how many families and secondary school aged children were present, a true testament to the wider appeal of this magical story. On the whole, this production left me feeling entertained and was a good introduction to Shakespeare for a younger audience. I would recommend this show to families across the country as the tour continues until the end of August.  

See http://www.chapterhouse.org/show1.html for further details of locations, dates and tickets.

Reviewer - Johanna Hassouna-Smith
on - 28/6/18