Acting in Lockdown: Midsummer Night Stream
The current COVID-19 pandemic has seen theatres around the world closed as society social distances and stays home. When the theatres will re-open is uncertain: the West End hopes for a 1 June re-opening; whereas some theatres have pulled their entire summer season, with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and the RSC’s Swan Theatre remaining dark until autumn. There have been calls to make archived recordings more accessible during lockdown, at least until the theatres re-open. Such recordings are usually the reserve of expensive academic streaming services such as Drama Online, or, in the case of the National Theatre, cinema screenings of encore performances with a ticket price higher than your usual cinema trip. Major theatres and big names have responded with the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, streaming productions for free on YouTube for a limited time. These have been hugely popular — The National Theatre’s Screening of Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors drew a live at-home audience of around 200,000. However, the pandemic has also spawned a new form of theatre — streamed live performance. Using video conferencing software such as Zoom, actors are coming together, in their own homes, to perform for a socially-distanced audience.
In the evening of 11 April, actor and director Sid Phoenix amassed a cast of actors to perform a rehearsed and staged production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream hosted by Made At Home. Using Zoom video conferencing and streaming directly to YouTube, Midsummer Night Stream was a masterclass of what is possible when arts thinks outside of the ‘proscenium arch’ box.
This was a hopeful and light-hearted Dream for a world that could do with the sort of alternate reality pick-me-up only theatre can deliver. Gone was the dark, uncomfortable atmosphere of Dominic Hill’s 2019 Dream at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, that Ben noted was couched in cynical postmodernism, and the questioning of the sexual politics of coercion that I noted underscored Nicholas Hytner’s recent Dream at the Bridge Theatre. But instead, an interesting textual change saw the play open with Peter Quince (Tom Black) initiating a Zoom call to gather the mechanicals ahead of the nuptials. We then drop into Theseus (Adam Blake) and Hippolyta’s (Anna Sambrooks) loving relationship, complete with matching outfits, baby and dog. The perfect power couple here were reframed as the founders of the world’s largest entertainment agency — no hint of Hippolyta being the spoils of war. Their wedding, to be held in social isolation, was presented as a means to stabilise stock prices.
The fairies provided the only extent to which this production held any hint of the text’s inherent undercurrents of sexual manipulation that can darken modern productions. David Alwyn’s Oberon and Sid Phoenix’s Puck offered a dangerous sexuality — in contrast to the poised presenting to camera of the other characters, they lounged lasciviously, sipping on whisky and rum, with Puck’s Tinkerbell mug an amusing side note. It was these characters that played most noticeably at the edges of the play’s imagined reality, breaking the wall between socially isolated characters, with Puck passing the purple flower (reimagined as a nail varnish) to Oberon through the screen and using a varnished finger held towards the screen to suggest the drugging of the lovers and Titania.
However, it was in the treatment of the Bottom and Titania love drug deceit that this playing at the edges was most noticeable. Puck, in a blink and you’ll miss it moment, appeared on screen with Joanna Brown’s Bottom to effect the transformation. A moment so brief as to appear magical — surely it didn’t just happen? Indeed, a moment my viewing companion missed. Later, in restoring Titania (Rachel Waring), Oberon appeared in her room. At first seeming to be reflected in a mirror, as if through magical apparition, the reality being the much more plausible explanation that he was in fact physically present in the same acting space. The fact the audience, however briefly, could suspect magic is a credit to the staging of the couple’s opening argument that saw the pair argue, not in person, but by video conference with no hint of the shared space.
Despite the overtly sexualised Puck and Oberon, the social distancing of Titania and Bottom undermined Oberon’s potentially sexually violating treatment of Titania. As an audience we didn’t need to contend with questions of sexual consent but rather could enjoy Rachel Waring’s joyously giggly Titania as she flirted with an increasingly confused Bottom from the relative safety of her bedroom. The cut back to Oberon and Puck cackling with laughter and unable to speak framed this device as a light-hearted prank rather than anything more serious. Placing Oberon in the same room as Titania and cutting the live stream on the hint of make-up sex allowed the audience to enjoy another well matched and happy couple in contented social isolation — placing Oberon and Titania alongside Theseus and Hippolyta as a couple that had moved beyond the text’s inherent scepticism. Titania ultimately gained the upper hand as Oberon moved into her space, as the name on the screen remained solely ‘Titania’, the King of Shadows having moved into the light where he doesn’t rule.
It would have been easy for the production to take the form of a rehearsed reading or to have exploited the virtual background functionality of Zoom to create common backdrops. However, choosing to embrace the idiosyncrasies of video conferencing added strength to Phoenix’s world of the play. In a world where all social interaction is currently taking place remotely, metatheatrical nods to the conventions of Zoom calls added a reality to the production. The names on screens added much to the characterisation — ‘Snug Fit Joiners Ltd.’, a corporate identity masking the goofball character, and as my viewing companion noted, social influencer Hermia was always going to spell her name ‘h e r m i a’ on social media. The screen names offered no assistance with the gender ambiguous Helena (Will Thompson-Brant) identified as ‘H xx’ on screen: it was never clear whether Helena was a male actor in a female role or whether the role’s gender had been changed, and quite frankly, it didn’t matter.
Where the metatheatrical nods were most prominent was with the mechanicals. I have previously written about the blurring of lines between audience and mechanicals in modern performance, with the mechanicals increasingly involving and including the audience in their play-within-a-play. Obviously, in socially distanced streamed performance the audience is arguably further away than ever. However, there was a recognition that the mechanicals were ‘one of us’ grappling with new forms of communication. Who hasn’t been on a call where a participant flips from one virtual background to another as Snug (Steven Rogers) did constantly, or had someone disappear completely into the background like James Dillon’s Starveling?
The play-within-a-play was a joy: Phoenix allowing it to play out without noble interjection was an innovative move, letting the play speak for itself. Again, exploiting the limitations of video conferencing added an extra layer of comedy. Frances Flute (Olivia Caley) making her theatrical appearance on mute could only work in this medium and coupled with the exaggerated signing of her co-actors was very of the moment. James Dillon’s Starveling was characteristically straightforward, his self-taping ring light as Moonshine an amusing reminder of the underlying actor’s life of constant audition (in this iteration both of James Dillon the actor and Starveling, showcasing his work to the world’s largest entertainment agency). The puppet show of stick men and a sketched wall was inspired, allowing the other actors to play voice over artist to Starveling’s show. But Pyramus and Thisbe is Bottom’s moment to steal the show, and Joanna Brown did just that — absent the physical humour that usually accompanies Pyramus’s death, Brown resorted to unexpected rapping to Peter Quince’s abject horror and Starveling’s unabashed glee. It was inspired to leave Starveling on screen throughout — James Dillon’s reaction was a joy, and, in that moment, he was all of us at home.
There were limitations to the staging. The four lovers were, understandably, not in the same place. This meant that the physical comedy of the four-way lovers’ fight of Act 3 Scene 2 just wasn’t possible. One of the joys of that scene in performance is the over-the-top demonstrative fighting between the love-drugged Lysander and Demetrius coupled with the usually exaggerated reactions of Helena and Hermia as they experience a gamut of emotions. Similarly, as we the audience are watching them not lost in a forest, but rather in the actors’ own separate homes, some of the impact is lost — the text alone can’t carry this scene. This is not to detract from the acting, but rather a comment on the limitations of the media. Rebekah Finch as Hermia and Will Thompson-Brant as Helena were notably excellent in their roles, exploiting the possibilities of up-close webcam filming to deliver subtle, nuanced and emotional performances.
At a time when the streamed archived productions can seem from another time, this Dream, reimagined for a socially isolated audience, seemed appropriate. A couple of hours of joy drawing on and playing with the unusual conventions of our currently locked down society. The production has been recorded and is now available on YouTube. If you didn’t catch it live, I’d fully recommend you watch now, while you can.
