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Sydney Theatre
until 22nd March
Bookings: (02) 9250 1999
This Dream is the theatrical equivalent of ecstasy in the 80s. It is wonderfully strange, terribly sexy and made me feel quite out of touch at curtain call.
As my theatre buddy and I strolled down Hickson Road afterwards we happily recounted the various productions of the Dream we had seen. We reckoned we’d seen over a dozen or so over the years and for me this was the most magical. Unfortunately, many never seem to get within a fairy’s wand of being magical.
My buddy also deliberated upon what some audience members, new to Shakespeare’s play, might make of this multi-lingual production that uses languages from India and Sri Lanka as well as English.
Luckily I know the play very well and thought, ‘Stuff the ignorant wombats – they’ve got The Biggest Loser to entertain them’. No seriously, I thought about how this production is visually stunning yet it never feels over-conceptualised. I thought about how it is anchored by a deep understanding of the text but it is not tied to convention. It could be, I thought, the best introduction to Shakespeare you might get.
The Bard’s truthful rather than cynical depiction of the fickleness in young love and compromise in mature couplings is told here through dance, music, circus and street theatre as well as acting. It is a big Dream. Director Tim Supple and his collaborators created it in India over a couple of years.
Supple, an English opera and theatre director, has said he “enjoys stories about human beings that are not quite human”. He excels at the helm of this production.
Supple finds exactly the right balance between humour and seriousness. When Egeus threatens to kill his daughter Hermia because she won’t marry the man of his choice, it rings true. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a production where I actually believed him. This production also allows things to get a bit hairy in the woods as the baser instincts of the characters come to the fore. The groping and fighting is nasty and dangerous. God help Helen if that spell wears off.
There are many memorable moments when you gasp at the sheer spectacle aided by Sumant Jayakrishnan’s brilliant design.
All the performances are marked by a terrific physical clarity. But perhaps most memorable is Joy Fernandes’s sublime Bottom.
His performance lifts the oaf to heroic status and that gives the production its guts.
This is matchless theatre.
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