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Fresh authenticity goes into Shakespeare鈥檚 鈥楧ream鈥
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THE classic Shakespeare comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” just finished the first stop of a China tour in Shanghai, and the three performances were well received by Shanghai audiences.
Next stop: Hangzhou.
Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe since 2006, talked to Shanghai Daily about some ideas behind this new production.
Q: Compared with previous productions, what are some of the things you discovered by studying the history of this play?
A: The great thing about being at the Globe is that we can do Shakespeare plays as if they were new plays. Because of that, it removes the necessity to study other productions. We feel like we are doing it for the first time.
And that is very releasing, because it doesn’t become theater about theater. It is a play about life, love and fantasy, so it releases the energy of the play, and I think that makes it simple, powerful, accessible, fresh.
We are always guessing, trying to imagine how they were originally presented, because we don’t know. You would be a fool if you said this is exactly like it was. Hopefully we catch some of the spirit, and that’s what keeps it fresh.
Q: How many actors came for
this tour in China?
A: About 50. It’s the same as the number that we had in last year’s show when we played at the Globe. Sometimes we tour around small-scale companies, like other touring companies, when they travel away from the theater, they have fewer actors and are more mobile, cheaper. We do that because it’s after the fashion of how Shakespeare’s company toured. But also it’s lovely to take a full production, which we do very often as well, and we try to bring the set that gives the impression of what being at the Globe is like.
Q: What were the first ideas behind the stage design?
A: The world of the supernatural and the world of fairies. We talked a lot about that, and we looked at a huge number of visual references. One is when we discovered you would be best to define the fairies by their function, by what they do in the play, rather than by an idea of your own. So we thought about what the function was, and that is to be enchanting and beautiful and sublime, and also occasionally terrifying and scary.
Because of the transition between the human and animals, these shapes of part human and part not human are very interesting to explore.
We also wanted to look at the war between men and women in the play, and the fact that Theseus and Hippolyta is not a marriage of love. She’s a hostage who is captured by Theseus in battle. We wanted that story to be told in the beginning.
Then we look at what Amazons were, and the fact that there were Amazons in Shakespeare’s time.
Q: Are there any changes in the text?
A: Very few. Usually when you do a play like “Hamlet,” there were three different texts in Shakespeare’s lifetime, all very different. So when you create your own, you have to look at all three and you make a collection of choices about which one you want to go with.
As we made very few changes. There was one point we moved a speech of Bottom’s (Nick Bottom, a character from the play) from one place to another, but that’s simply because it’s just more structural.
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