A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Globe, 2.6.14, with Eve and Anna
This year and last year, the Globe have been reviving the ‘Globe to Globe’ shows from 2012’s World Shakespeare Festival, which is lucky for the likes of me, who missed almost all of them at the time. Among the 37 plays in 37 languages (poor old Two Noble Kinsmen, left out in the cold) was this Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in British Sign Language. BSL seems, to me, more accessible than most ‘foreign’ languages, because it is so often governed by common sense (unlike, to pick a scapegoat at random, Greek) and its combination of facial and gestural signals is often easy to understand even for the ignorant (that’s us).
The audience is a mix of hearing and Deaf people, as we can tell from the even spread of applause and hand-waving at the curtain call. The play, as well as being lively and fun, seems overwhelmingly inclusive and warm-hearted – quite apart from the use of BSL, the cast are racially diverse and of varying body types. The production even manages to re-imagine Theseus as CEO of the Bank of Athens without making any cracks about how there’s no money in his vaults.
Musical accompaniment from a four-piece band (who play various instruments but predominantly guitar, clarinet, violin and percussion) provides an aural landscape for those of us who need one. Surtitles provide a gloss on events for those who don’t know the play. Occasionally these are amusingly superfluous, as when Hermia’s signing and acting make the audience fully aware that ‘Hermia is upset.’ At the end, Puck signs the epilogue as the surtitles prompt ‘If we shadows have offended…’ for those who do know the play, inviting us to fill in the rest from memory. Sometimes important lines are dubbed by Puck and his fairy sidekick. Peter Quince is a middle-management busybody and BSL novice, and his laborious attempts to spell out ‘Pyramus’ and ‘Thisbe’ get a lot of laughs. At one point, trying to get Thisbe’s attention while his back is turned by roaring like a lion, Snug the joiner sighs, turns to the audience and signs ‘ohhhh, he’s deaf.’ (Snug the Joiner is always my favourite, because he – or she in this case – wears a lion costume). The combination of visuals and sound is extremely well-thought-out to cater to everyone: those who don’t know BSL, and those who do. The play is perhaps not very streamlined as a result, with so much going on, but it is never less than entertaining.
Aesthetically, it’s a mix of standard leafy forest effects and grubbier, rubbish dump detail. Bottom’s ass ears are two squashed plastic bottles; his hooves are empty tomato tins. Titania and Oberon have fabulous grassy tiaras. The non-fairy characters are contemporary: sharp suit and cigar for Theseus; quilted gilet for Lysander; employee lanyards for the mechanicals. Hermia is burdened with a bubblegum-pink wheelie suitcase, which she trails round and round the yard when, brilliantly, the groundlings are treated as the trees of a labyrinthine forest with all four lovers wandering amongst us.
Puck is appropriately mischievous; I particularly liked the way he kicks back and shares some popcorn with his fairy pal while spectating on the lovers’ four-way tiff. The band are recruited to flesh out the cast of Pyramus and Thisbe; the guitarist gets the starring role of ‘Wall.’ Bottom soon realises that Pyramus can’t sign to his paramour through the conventional ‘chink,’ and promptly knocks a more substantial hole in the wall which he can stick both arms through.
I don’t really want to weigh in on the debate of whether, with so few lines of the play as written, this is ‘really’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because it seems to be a debate mostly designed to protect Shakespeare from innovation. Actually, it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of Shakespeare we should be commissioning, with the quatercentenary looming. (I’m reliably informed that that is the correct spelling of quatercentenary, though I was as suspicious as you.) It’s not remotely elitist, but it makes sharp use of the audience’s familiarity with the play (‘if we shadows have offended…’) while introducing fresh ways of telling this old story. It’s also very unpretentious, and a lot of fun. More of this please.
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