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Canberra Today 12°/16° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: Nothing ‘straight’ about this Dream

IN this large-cast production backed by Queanbeyan City Council, director Jordan Best has attempted a “straight” production of a much loved Shakespeare work. 

Tim Sekuless as Oberon. Photo by Craig Burgess, Family Fotographics
Tim Sekuless as Oberon. Photo by Craig Burgess, Family Fotographics
But there’s nothing the least bit straight about the play itself, straddling the human and the nether worlds through a series of complicated theatrical permutations, so she’s set herself a tall task.

Perhaps the four “ordinary” lovers (Rachel Clapham as Hermia, Jenna Roberts as Helena and Duncan Driver and Chris Zuber as lookalike Demetrius and Lysander) are straightish, but that illusion is undercut by Roberts, who turns in a smashing performance as the girl who wears her heart on her sleeve with lugubrious ostentation.

Then there’s the “odd couple” of David Evans as the chaos-loving Puck and Tim Sekuless as a dictatorial Oberon. Alison McGregor as his fairy queen Titania, full of physical flexibility and insinuation, but without poetry, is hardly a match for their strangeness.

Indeed in the race to make everything as funny as possible, the lush, pictorial poetry of Shakespeare’s “Dream” is generally absent.

The Athenian mechanicals are an odd but generally humorous lot, headed up by David Cannell as a Cockney Peter Quince and Cameron Thomas as an Ocker Nick Bottom, but the director works them too hard and too long, leading to a drawn-out finale.

Wayne Shepherd, who plays an unusually compliant Egeus, has also designed a brilliant forest of drapes with a huge acting space in the clearing, giving Best huge problems in filling the stage arena adequately. The visual beauty of the set could have been enhanced by more subtle lighting on the floor, which, viewed from the raked seating, looked, well, like a stage floor.

The decision to dress the human cast in vaguely 1920s costumes of varying quality worked fairly well for laughs but poorly for verisimilitude as the forest becomes thicker and the lovers more tattered and exhausted.

And the fairies? Best has opted for female spirits rather than Shakespeare’s masculine ones, clothed like figures from an Arthur Rackham drawing, yet Erin Pugh shines as the boyishly reluctant Moth.

Look closely at the gossamer fairy wings, designed collaboratively by goldsmith Mia Ching and textile artist Ann McMahon. They’re subtly printed with Marion Mahoney Griffin’s designs for Canberra. And, in Queanbeyan, celebrating its 175th birthday this year, there’s not a centenary logo in sight!

Griffin-inspired  Fairy wing
Griffin-inspired Fairy wing

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Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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