1990
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
Footsbarn
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Footsbarn are a remarkable theatre company. With minimal subsidy they have toured for nearly twenty years presenting more than 47 productions. While their range is wide, Shakespeare is their staple. Adelaide saw Macbeth in the 1986 Festival, a production which they rehearsed at McLaren Vale and took on the the road to sixteen different countries.
From its origins in Cornwall (in the barn of founding actor, Oliver Foot as a matter of fact) Footsbarn has become a thoroughly international company listing Russian, Polish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and Italian nationals among its number. This, along with the fact that they now infrequently perform to English-speaking audiences, has had a discernible influence on the way Footsbarn present texts such as Shakespeare.
Footsbarn’s newest production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. has all their familiar hallmarks and, unfortunately, some of their familiar excesses also. Footsbarn often get the kind of press hype that says they do Shakespeare the way he would have liked it – as though Will’s shade had given them a special dispensation. Certainly they present very likeable Shakespeare with plenty of emphasis on foolery but on the strength of the first night of this production, you couldn’t say that they hold the patent.
Even more than their Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is such a mixture of ingredients that the result is a mixed success. Unlike Macbeth, where they could fasten on to the strong throughline in the text and make it into a fiercesome little mummers’ play, Footsbarn approach the Dream, with its multiple levels and invitation to fancy, by loading it with a surfeit of theatrical business losing much of the play’s nimble structure in the process.
It is one of the company’s most valued tenets that they work collectively, without a director – a view many actors would warmly approve- but the price Footsbarn pay, at least in this early stage of the Dream’s evolution, is a production that is an accretion of individual contributions, a sum that is less than its parts.
The opening scene is indicative of what is to follow – a procession of masks, ancient and modern, white Italianate bird masks, traditional Balinese eye-bulgers, Demetrius and Lysander as haughty roosters, whiteface for Egeus and splendid feathery wigs for Theseus and Hippolyta, even, seemingly for no other reason than that they had them on hand, two giant hindu oxen. It is all wonderful- and meaningless at the same time, eclectic panto, ample evidence of the skill and invention of mask-maker Fredericka Lascelles and Marianne Prins’ costumes but vague and unintegrated, a triumph of embellishment.
The music, performed principally by Katarzyna Klebba on violin, Stephen Johnstone on guitar (among other things) and percussionist Boris Sekhon, is similarly highly accomplished but used to excess. The percussion especially is like the soundtrack to a cartoon, prosaically illustrating the action. This is not helped by the fact that when he is not hypermanically playing the xylophone, Sekhon is playing Puck (deprived of all text) as a kind of wayward simian. Footsbarn don’t seem to want to acknowledge that if the text is secondary (no heresy, even for Shakespeare) then the visual meaning needs to be clear and crisp.
The production has many fine moments nonetheless. David Johnston’s detailed physicality brings the priggish Demetrius to life and his Peter Quince is equally a delight. Just for the good measure in the closing scene he plays a accordian solo which has a haunting simplicity that the play as a whole could well emulate. Patrick Hayter plays a droll Lysander but as Bottom, while his huge buck teeth make a right donkey of him, when it comes to telling us about his most rare vision he is reduced to gargling. It’s fine to make the artisans into clowns but this Bottom is too broad for his own good.
Pureza Pinto Leite is a winsome Hermia and Margaret Watkiss a convincing Helena, although, deprived of many her of lines she too is unreasonably forced to busk it. As Oberon and Titania (doubling as Theseus and Hippolyta) Joseph Cunningham and Margaret Bierye are disappointingly lack-lustre but Titania’s seduction of Bottom- luring him into a gigantic venus flytrap (an inspired creation from Charmian Goodall) makes a splendid tableau.
In such a small cast, the fairy numbers look inquorate (the performance of the lamentable Pyramus and Thisbe gets by with four mechanicals as well) but pleasingly they are more like oddball goblins out of Maxfield Parrish than your common and garden Dream fairies. In the final scene, with Puck short of an epilogue and the court rather confusingly represented by masks and drapery, the artisans mix with the fairies for a final wander into the audience. It is effective but seems like an after-thought. Act V is a bit late in the play to start breaking down the proscenium.
In this production Footsbarn offer more than they follow through on. The masks, the Balinese influences, the interaction with the audience – all have promise that doesn’t eventuate. We have seen other versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lately, notably Glenn Elston’s Botanic Gardens excursion. It also was boisterous and populist but it had a compression and thematic wit that despite their tremendous talent Footbarn don’t achieve. Something sharper and leaner is called for. For all its good humour this Dream is a lazy one.
“Eclectic Panto” The Adelaide Review, No.78, July 1990, p.34.