The cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream 'don't so much take the stage as invade the theatre, spilling in through the auditorium in a frenzy'.
A Midsummer Night's Dream Peacock Theatre, Dublin When the line comes, it is delivered with the over-familiarity of a cliché, a shrugging understanding that the words have been said several thousand times already: "The course of true love never did run smooth." In National Youth Theatre's ferociously energetic production, that's putting it mildly. But Barry Morgan's reading, as Athenian bad boy Lysander, reveals another layer of this production's wit. Here it is desire, more than love, that rages like an ungovernable torrent. György Vidovszky's production, full of sound and fury and signifying quite a number of things, recognises that even a play as fun and frantic as A Midsummer Night's Dream can be shaken up and made anew with youthful vigour. That's why the cast - drawn from several youth theatres under the aegis of the National Association of Youth Drama - don't so much take the stage as invade the theatre, spilling in through the auditorium in a frenzy. Or why they reverberate with the spiky sexual politics of the play more than its fantasy, making almost every coupling an act of violent force or subjugation. Even Mary-Rose Phipps, as a sort of mall-punk Puck, is sexualised and subversive, while the union of Brian Devaney's road-warrior Theseus and Róisín Watson's otherworldly Hippolyta is achieved only by means of sturdy restraints and a burlap sack. The stage picture, under Eamon Fox's iridescent lights, may be beautiful, but the dream could shatter into a nightmare at any second. Just as Diego Pitarch's design, equal parts elegance and decay, preserves the framework of a demolished house but hollows out a liberated centre, so the play gets similar treatment. The verse and tangled desires of Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena - a love quadrangle further complicated by fairy intervention - remain a protected structure, but there is more than a touch of extended Saturday morning improv to the renovated prose of the hapless rude mechanicals: "We don't need the original text, Nick," Quince tells Bottom. "F**k the purists." Shakespeare certainly allows for such self-mocking gestures, but these scenes are less successful precisely because the play wasn't that pure to begin with. Characters such as Roxanna Nic Liam's masochistic Helena are spurred on by rejection ("The more you beat me, the more I will fawn on you") but horrified by reciprocation; lovers become enemies in a heartbeat; desire is fickle and instantaneous; the moment of consummation is profoundly awkward. Any similarity to adolescence is entirely intentional. And although the stage abounds with apples (the semiotician's go-to device for forbidden longing), all that wild energy finally succumbs, rather sweetly and conservatively, to a low-lit snog-a-thon . . . How do you like them apples? Ends Sat
PETER CRAWLEY
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