"Finding New Ways to Dream"- Michael Kunze on Loose Cannon's "A Midsummer Night's Dream?" at the Project Arts Centre, June 15

Sitting in the audience, waiting for the show to begin.
Photo: Rosa Naravette

In Loose Cannon’s hilarious A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the company thumbed its nose at “traditional” productions of the show, yet still managed to get at the heart of the piece, reminding us that while we should not be ignorant of a play’s history, it is not set in stone. As a disclaimer, it should be said that this production of the play is not for Shakespeare diehards, those who hang onto the rhythm and rhyme of the language and fight to the death to preserve the sanctity of the text. It is for those of us who have never seen Shakespeare, or are tired of tired productions of Midsummer. It is for people who find it mostly irrelevant to our crazy mixed-up modern world, and for those of us who would like to dig up Shakespeare from his grave and ask the simple question: “What the hell are you talking about?”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is perhaps the most performed play of Shakespeare’s vast canon. It is full of fairies and whimsy and jealous lovers and magic spells. Almost anyone familiar with the world of theater is familiar with the world of Oberon and Titania and the four star-crossed lovers, and some of us have seen the play countless times. As a consequence, some swear they will never go to see another production, for with each new viewing comes diminished returns. How many ways can one frolic like a fairy? How many ways can a stage capture the magic of the forest? How many ways can the lines be said in perfect iambic pentameter, capturing the full glory of Shakespeare’s words?

Loose Cannon answers all of these questions by changing the questions themselves, and manage to bring new meaning and depth to the play while at the same time updating it for a modern audience. The forest was erased; the stage was merely a white box, with a few tables off to the side containing the minimal props used in the show: a few bottles, a pack of cigarettes, and of course, fairy wings. Instead of moving through a dark and powerful forest bursting with whimsy, the actors sauntered through cyberspace, their paths improvised to the whims of their imaginations. Oftentimes they seemed bored and static, standing around doing nothing, perhaps echoing our own fatigue with the overwrought clichés of prancing fairies. Yet their movements still rang with truth in a modern sense, the lovers especially calling to mind the slouched disinterest with which our youth approach romance. This is not to say they were not attracted to each other, but rather that their magnetism was fueled by other, more primal things. The lovers stumbled around as if intoxicated, occasionally bumping into each other in a drugged-out lazy haze.

And the fairies themselves! It seemed as if they were making up for centuries of men having their masculinity stripped away as they were forced to caper and cavort in tights and pixie wings. Gone were the tights and fantastical feathers and frisking through the forest, replaced with heavy metal t-shirts and ripped jeans and the barest suggestion of wings: simple things of elastic and plastic such as an eight-year old girl would wear on Halloween. And when the wings were strapped on as the actors switched characters it was done with the obstinacy of a teenage boy forced to read romantic poetry. And the most prominent proponent of this theme of the anti-fairy was Phil Kingston, who played what is usually the most frivolous of fairies, the mischievous Puck. Standing there chain-smoking cigarettes in his Black Sabbath tee with his little pot-belly sticking out, one could not be reminded less of the prototypical loud, lithe and bubbly incarnations of the character with which we are all so familiar.

Phil Kingston as Puck. 

Mr. Kingston seemed to be one of the only actors making attempts at iambic pentameter, but only so far as to make fun of it. He delivered his lines in a mulish monotone, saying the lines with a marked disinterest and the childishness of a nursery rhyme. The other actors chopped up the lines in more strange ways, mostly devoid of any particular rhyme scheme. Leading the charge in this insurrection against the iamb was the actor who played both Lysander and King Oberon, who spoke haltingly and with odd, non-poetic emphasis. Some members of the audience claimed that he was difficult to follow, but I was not hindered in my way. His speech pattern, in my experience, is a very common way to talk in this day and age.

This performance brought into focus the follies of clinging too tightly to “Shakespearean tradition”, and poked fun at those who champion too strongly the inviolability of that tradition. One of my major complaints with seeing Shakespeare performed is that oftentimes it does not make sense. Sometimes people seem to just say the lines and trust in the natural beauty and “Shakespearean quality” of the language without actually taking the time to learn what those words mean and how they relate to our time period. Shakespeare’s work has stood the test of time because the themes and the characters and the stories still are relevant to our own lives. One should not have to be a Shakespearean scholar and enthusiast to appreciate and benefit from those messages. This is not to say that one cannot successfully perform Midsummer in iambic pentameter with frilly fairy costumes and a magical enchanted forest. It has been done, and will continue to be done with beauty and skill. But it is a failure if the production only focuses on these elements without attempting to make sense of the story itself.

Despite all the deliberate disses to the Shakespearean tradition, the Loose Cannon production still managed to hold onto the spine of the story. One still felt the pain of Hermia when she awoke to find her love’s love gone and her fury at Helena for that loves loss. And Helena in turn, evoked empathy for the  imagined cruelty towards her at the hands of Demetrius and Lysander, who in the blink of an eye go from spurning her to proclaiming their love for her. The most powerful moment for me was when Peter Quince apologized to the audience, saying he was sorry if he offended with his production of the play within the play, echoing the offence that many audience members felt at the treatment of Shakespeare’s hallowed text. He then went on to gently remind us that it was all a dream, that it was all Bottom’s dream, that life is all just a dream. And these messages, even in this modern day and age, still rang true.