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A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2007
27 February, 2007 - 3 March, 2007
Florence McFarlane set our first Bard in the Yard Midsummer Night’s Dream in an old folk’s home so the four ‘young’ lovers were aged from 60s to 80s.
The play was part of the Wellington Fringe Festival and received this positive review from Ewen Coleman in the Dominion Post:
Sheer delight
Review by Ewen Coleman 06th Mar 2007
The two plays of Shakespeare that are most associated with youth are Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so to have the latter set in a rest home where the majority of the characters are in their dotage, as they are in Butterfly Creek Theatre Troupes current Bard-In-The-Yard production seems a most unusual approach. Yet surprisingly this works exceptionally well showing that elderly folk regressing into second child hood can be as fanciful and romantic as adolescents.
In this instance Theseus (David Geldhill), the owner of the Athena Villas Retirement Centre, is about to be betrothed to the Head Nurse Hippolyta (Kat Angus). However before the nuptials can begin and much to the annoyance of Egeus, the chief Social Worker (Sandra Gillespie) four of the residence elope to the native bush behind the rest home. First Hermia (Sue Jones) trots off in her zimmer frame with Lysander (Jerry Duckor) on his walking stick in hot pursuit. Then Demetrius (Peter Baldock), a little more sprightly, chases after these two with Helena (Fran Baldock), having done her early morning palates, chasing him.
At the same time a group of workmen are putting together a play for Theseus’s wedding – Pyramus And Thisbe – while nearby Dr Oberon (Will Clannachan) is dispensing happy pills to his young intern Puck (Theo Nettleton) as a way of persuading him to help the doctor in his advances on the Occupational Therapist Titania (Alex Cooper).
From here the play follows very much Shakespeare’s original, although in a rather pared down version, with lots of mayhem and confusion until all the lovers are finally reconciled and attend the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta and the entertaining but highly exaggerated performances of the workers play.
By having the central characters as geriatrics director Florence McFarlane has given the play a highly entertaining but very plausible twist, the many lines that have a youthful ring, coming across in this production as not only real but very funny. The four actors in the roles of the lovers vying for each others affections are a sheer delight as they clamber over their Zimmer frames trying to quell their ardour.
Other performances of note are that of Theo Nettleton as a very energetic Puck, his sinewy elastic body never still for a minute as he bounds about the stage and John Marwick’s consummate performance as Bottom, eloquently mastering Shakespeare’s language to make this unusual rendition of one of the Bard’s most popular and famous plays highly entertaining.
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