A
Midsummer Night's Dream
by
William Shakespeare
Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides production of A Midsummer Night's Dream
arrived at the Globe just after finishing a tour of Brazil, spent two hours
rehearsing on the stage in front of an audience of builders and pleasantly surprised
tourists, and less than an hour later, the company were putting on their single
performance to a packed Globe house.
The company discovered how to exploit many of the space's possibilities. Even
within the few hours of rehearsal time, actors were moving through the auditorium
to test acoustics and sightlines, and the rehearsal audience were brought into
the exercise to play a major role.
Rutter would shout to a punter in the upper gallery: 'Can you hear that?'; actors
on the stage would try out lines to see how to embrace the whole auditorium.
If something didn't work - a blocking move, an exit, an entrance, Rutter would
experiment to find other ways to play the scene.
The public rehearsal of this Dream was probably an object lesson in how a company
of actors can find out how to get used to the Globe space. The Northern Broadsides
company had toured this production in all kinds of spaces - from purpose built
theatres to factories.
Asked whether he felt his approach to the rehearsal process would need to be
any different from his usual approach - would you want, for example, actors
to spend more time getting used to the space, the distinctive configuration
of audience/actor of the new Globe? Rutter replies: 'No and No - as we proved
with just two hours' familiarisation, then a party for sixteen hundred people
courtesy of Will Shakespeare'.
The first half was played in their own clothes - mostly jeans and T-shirts emblazoned
with the company logo, a boar's head. Rutter had warned the audience before
the play began that three cases of costumes had been lost somewhere between
Rio and Heathrow, so that as with their rapid acclimatising to the stage and
space, the players had to improvise to make up for the loss of any help from
costume in their characterisation - no mean feat when you are a 14-stone workman
transformed into a fairy with nothing but movement and voice to disguise you.
When Rutter walked on stage for the second half, dressed in a black coat festooned
with rainbow-coloured favours, a splendid hat covered in flowers and sprouting
tall, winking pheasant feathers, the audience - in the yard and in the galleries
alike - gave a roar of applause.
The irony of course was now that Rutter was dressed in character, it was not
Oberon the playgoers were applauding, but the actor who had had to play the
part not dressed for it throughout the first half, as well as the costume itself.
It provided yet another of the many examples in the Prologue Season when the
combination of audience and actor in this roofless theatre produced such a potent
blurring of the boundaries between the world of the play and the world of the
playgoers.
One of the most remarkable moments of the whole Prologue Season was towards
the end of the Dream performance when, appropriately enough, in a scene which
celebrates the magical powers of the theatre, Rutter brought the whole production
down to a whisper. Open to the sun-filled daylight; packed with highly visible
bodies dressed in shorts and vests and summer frocks, with no sign of a lighting
effect or a single scenic trick, the theatre became a spell-charmed circle.
The audience was 'spell-stopp'd' by the fiction.
"A
Night to remember.....a refreshingly far cry from received pronunciation....the
mechanicals are lovably observed and as authentic as I have seen."
The Times
"..the rasp,relish and simplicity with which
he (Rutter) stages the Dream make you hear it entirely afresh...I've never
seen an angrier, more quarrelsome Dream."
The Observer
"The brisk, no-nonsense staging is a delight.
This is a production that achieves a genuine rough magic."
Daily Telegraph
"Northern Broadsides are claiming Shakespeare
for their own voice and as previously, they make their point. To hear 'I know
a bank where the wild thyme blows' in the scoops of Rutter's Yorkshire is
not an exciting novelty, it just sounds right."
The Independent
"This homely,
good-hearted show brims with warmth and vitality."
Daily Telegraph
