Theatre / A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare. At Aunty Louise Brown Park (outside The Q, Queanbeyan), until December 15. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.
The new Aunty Louise Brown Park outside The Q turns out to be just the space for Echo Theatre’s lively take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
There’s plenty of grass for audience to sit on or they can put a chair on the concrete verges. Voices are miked and director Jordan Best has gone for a clear, uncomplicated and good-humoured approach.
It’s a big cast, with a team of fairies who specialise in the rolling eyes of irony at the antics of both mortals and other fairies. Later they will become the court officials who in black and sunglasses attempt to keep the rude mechanical’s play Pyramus and Thisbe under some kind of control.
In a customary (but not compulsory) doubling of Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, Lainie Hart and Kate Harris are a strong team who differentiate the pairs well and with a degree of humour. Hart’s Oberon teams up nicely with a muttering agile Puck (Rachel Robertson) as they manipulate the helpless lovers and the hapless Bottom (Jim Adamik) and Harris goes from the dignity of Hippolyta to the rather more lush style of a powerful Titania.
The two pairs of lovers are suitably stubborn. Hermia (Liv Boddington) and Lysander (Isaiah Pritchard) are pragmatic in the face of parental insistence that she marry the rather arrogant Demetrius (Jack Shanahan), and run away to the forest, while lanky lovelorn Helena (Caitlin Baker) follows because she is in love with Demetrius and he has gone there in pursuit of Hermia. Puck’s clumsy use of a love potion doesn’t initially put things right and that’s half the fun.
As for the working-class acting group who meet in the fairy infested forest to rehearse the sad story of Pyramus and Thisbe, they’ve got Jim Adamik, all ego as the stage-struck Bottom, teaming with Callum Doherty’s somewhat fey Flute to give their all in the performance before the Duke’s court.
Costumes are eclectically beautiful and the show has a heap of atmosphere in the new space. One to put on the list for a pre-Christmas entertainment.
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