Shakespeare production sprinkled with magical fairy dust

Shakespeare in the Ruins delivered a jolt of fairy tale magic Thursday as it launched its 30th anniversary season with the Bard’s wacky, perennially popular comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The 150-minute show (including intermission), directed by company artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss, hasn’t been performed under the prairie night sky at The Ruins of Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park since 1995, making this re-mount a welcomed homecoming.

The nearly 430-year-old play with its convoluted, pretzel-like plot — including no fewer than five inter-connected sub-plots — twists and turns in a fantastical tale of mistaken identities and competing desires.

Set in ancient Athens on the cusp of the Duke of Athens, Theseus (Tom Soares), and Queen of the Amazons, Hippolita’s (Sharon Bajer) nuptials, its mythological narrative is essentially about love and the lengths we will go to drink of its elixir. However, it’s also about the eternal power of dreams and imagination, sprinkled liberally with a spray of pixie dust that never grows old.

The multi-generational cast works extremely well as a tightly knit ensemble, with nearly all of its versatile nine players performing multiple roles, while clearly enunciating Shakespeare’s lexicon of loftier iambic pentameter and more naturalistic, “commoner” prose.

It’s also humbling to see the show’s younger thespians performing alongside such venerable pillars of Winnipeg’s theatre community as Arne MacPherson, an original founder of SIR, as well as Bajer (marking her SIR debut) and the always wonderful Ross McMillan. Having this trifecta of local acting royalty infuses the entire evening with gravitas.

Beilfuss’s keen direction creates a psychedelic tickle trunk with a groovy ‘60s vibe, with the actors decked out in costume designer Brenda McLean’s colourful bell-bottom jeans, vests patched with crocheted granny squares, and tinted, Joplin-styled aviator sunglasses evoking an apropos “life through rose-coloured glasses” adage.

This ethos plays well with the “free love” thrust of the show that creates — then breaks apart — a series of love triangles, including Hermia (Hera Nalam, who also composed charming original songs performed on guitar/ukulele interlaced throughout the show), her BFF Helena (Melissa Langdon) and Demetrius (Elio Zarrillo).

But there’s also fascinating sub-text created regarding same-sex unions, with the apple of Hermia’s eye, Lysander, originally a male, now morphed into a so-cool-it-hurts Lysandra (Christine Leslie).

Gender swapping is nothing new in Shakespeare – plays such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night spring to mind – however the fact Hermia’s father Egeus (Joshua Beaudry) lords power and rails against her pursuit of another woman as her true love creates a compelling undertow about the destructive forces of homophobia. So too are Dream’s more fleeting, darker edges: Helena’s obsession with Demetrius despite his blatant rejection and emotional abuse is another, as are the Duke and Egeus’s misogynistic attitudes towards Hermia – and by extension, the proverbial fairer sex in general.

Having said this, some of the most riotous scenes arrive in Act 1, when MacPherson’s bespectacled carpenter Peter Quince barks out orders to his coterie of workmen — dressed in a rainbow spectrum of coveralls including name badges — rehearsing their “drama” Pyramus and Thisbe to be performed at Theseus and Hippolita’s wedding. A bumbling, blustering Beaudry as Bottom the weaver steals the scene every time with his larger-than-life portrayal and zany antics, often eliciting loud guffaws from the opening night capacity crowd.

Another highlight is McMillan, who surely has lived a lifetime to play trickster Robin “Puck” Goodfellow. The beloved actor evoking a life-sized, all-white Paddington Bear brings a world-weary ethos to Oberon’s “shrewd and knavish sprite,” relying not on the vanities of youth, but his bag of well-oiled tricks to help propel the plot. His riding into the scene from the leafy woods – a doppelganger if there ever were one for Shakespeare’s “Forest of Arden” — on a red, flower festooned bicycle injected the entire evening with joy, as gleeful as his pinging bicycle bell.

Kudos also to the incomparable Bajer for her unflinching fairy queen Titania, who falls head over heels in love with Bottom — now morphed into a donkey — after a concocted, magical flower potion is dropped into her eyes as her spiteful, estranged husband Oberon seeks his revenge. Splayed out with her lover Bottom in a hammock, Bajer infused her portrayal with equal parts humanity and raunchiness, making one re-think their preconceptions of fairies as well as bawdy appetites of older generations.

Comic brilliance also comes when Bajer immediately begins to bray upon waking to find Bottom; their quasi-orgasmic discovery of a shared love-language of hee-haws truly inspired.

The show rises to a fever pitch during Act 4, in which lovesick characters clash with each other until becoming eventually re-aligned with their true partners. This scene felt overly frantic, with the characters running pell-mell while hollering at each other ironically dispelling the show’s energy, while also obfuscating its through-line.

Promenade theatre, while undeniably creating a more interactive, immersive experience, also slows momentum — it takes a certain length of time for a larger crowd to schlepp chairs, and in this case, coats, hats and blankets, between three play locales — albeit all became forgiven during the final scene in which Quince’s players present their thinly disguised jab at Romeo and Juliet for the newly married couple among the glorious stone walls of the burnt out ruins.

Puck’s breaking the fourth wall during the play’s final moments, as he “restores amends” and suggests to the audience that even this performance was merely a dream was delivered with simple eloquence.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” is one of the play’s most iconic lines – and life’s greatest understatement — uttered early by Lysandra to Hermia in Act 1. Well no, it never has, and likely won’t for at least another 430 years. However in this case, thanks to Beilfuss’s dreamy new production brought to life by his own merry band of players, it still offers a helluva ride.

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