Lockdown Dreams Part 2: Socially Distanced Lovers
In my first article on ‘Lockdown Dreams’ — the multitude of Midsummer Night’s Dreams that have been created and performed online during lockdown — I considered the way different productions have created a distinction between the court of Athens and the woods. In particular, I focused on the ways in which technology was used (or not used) in these productions to create an authentic sense of the play’s magic, and the distinction between the mortal and magical characters. Having discussed the fairies in some detail during my previous article, I’m turning my attention to how Lockdown Dreams have so far brought the mortal characters to life. In this article, I’m looking at the courtiers, with my analysis largely focusing on the young lovers: Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius.
In doing so, I’m also forcing myself to engage with my least favourite group of the play. It’s not that I dislike the young lovers, just that I struggle to get particularly excited about or engaged with them in most productions. In her article on Fresh Life Theatre’s Hermia: Heaven Unto Hell, Gemma hit on the key reason why: ‘Shakespeare’s lovers are interchangeable, it hardly matters who ends up with whom’. Emma Smith offers a similar evaluation of the four characters, arguing that ‘[i]t’s hard to remember, still less to care, who gets off with whom at the end’ and that ‘[Dream] suggests that any combination is as good as any other’, offering a play ‘in which boys ricochet between girls at random, revealing the shallowness of their impulses’.¹ Gemma noted in relation to Fresh Life Theatre’s lover-centric pair of adaptations that it’s questionable whether ‘the lovers hold enough interest to support two alternate viewpoints’ due to ‘the limitations of the text’; it’s an issue which for me often makes them the least interesting part of any Dream adaptation on stage or screen. Essentially, the characters can end up feeling like cookie cutter versions of each other, their four-way entanglement lacking in emotional depth or investment.
For this reason, it’s often down to the strength of the actors playing the parts to make the young lovers memorable. This was arguably true in The Show Must Go Online’s (TSMGO) Dream, with the diverse ethnicities and acting styles of Hannah Ellis (Helena), MJ Lee (Hermia), Cameron Varner (Lysander) and Emilio Vieira (Demetrius) helping to make the four characters feel pleasingly distinct from one another. Myles also endeavoured to bring their spats to life as much as possible through inventive camera angles, particularly during the four-way quarrel of Act 3 Scene 2. However, as Gemma has suggested previously, there is a possibility that this scene in particular ‘will never work on a Zoom format with socially distanced actors’. As strong as the performances from Ellis, Lee, Varner and Vieira were, TSMGO’s Dream may have gone some way to proving this — compared to the rest of the production, the young lovers’ scenes felt noticeably flatter.
As noted earlier, the fault lies not in Myles’s direction or the abilities of his cast, but in the text itself. If productions taking place live on stage and in big budget screen versions have struggled to bring the young lovers to life in the past, those currently adapting and performing the roles under the limitations of lockdown have an extra hurdle to overcome. Gemma noted that the four actors playing the roles in 60 Hour Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Stream ‘offered [the production’s] stand-out performances . . . [exploiting] the nuances of acting in a small frame to great success’ — but, for me, the production didn’t do enough to make the characters feel distinct, the roles falling foul of their inherent similitude and proving once again to be the most forgettable element of the production. Arden Theatre Company’s (ATC) Dream fared better. The performances of Bryan Freedman (Lysander), Davon Johnson (Demetrius), Jess Money (Helena) and Georgie Summers (Hermia) were uniformly strong, particularly the physicality they brought to the lovers’ fight — complete with leaps on and off screen, flailing arms and legs, and superb reactions from each actor to where the other lovers ‘should be’ in relation to themselves. But when compared to the production’s fairies and mechanicals, who felt like they’d been given pleasing idiosyncrasies in their costuming, characterisation or aesthetic by director Matt Pfeiffer, the lovers struggled to make the same impression and once again succumbed too often to their textually shallow nature.
Both Gemma and I have written previously about the key strength of Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s Midsummer Night Stream being its commitment to setting the narrative in our current locked down world. In my previous article, I discussed how this allowed an authentic sense of magic to be created through carefully manufacturing low-tech ways for the fairies to bend the rules of technology. The setting also helped to elevate the young lovers. By not only performing the production via Zoom, but also having the characters overtly use the software to communicate with one another whilst socially isolating, director Sid Phoenix achieved two things. He created a reason for the characters to be speaking into their cameras, and he gave everyone in the audience a way to identify with them.
If I’m honest, the lovers still felt like the least successful part of Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s Stream — the fight of Act 3 Scene 2 lacked the physicality needed to make it work in particular. But the use of technology within the setting and the attention to detail helped to elevate the characters in a way that hasn’t been achieved in any of the other productions discussed so far in this article. Little touches such as ‘social influencer’ Hermia’s (Rebekah Finch) all-lower-case spaced out screen name and Helena’s (Will Thompson-Brant) much more unassuming ‘H xx’ helped to both flesh out the characters and differentiate them from one another in ways that other Lockdown Dreams haven’t. This was particularly true when considering the technological inexperience of Phoenix’s mechanicals (something I’ll discuss in more detail in my next article). In a pleasing parallel to the way Phoenix used technology to create a sense of magic, the director also embraced it to go some way to resolving the conundrum of the young lovers.
Focusing entirely on the young lovers’ narrative, Fresh Life Theatre’s Helena: Ugly as a Bear and Hermia: Heaven Unto Hell followed the journeys of the women in particular. The company also used technology to give the characters additional depth during the premiere of each film, with tweets written in role by each character appearing on the company’s Twitter feed throughout. As well as situating the young lovers firmly within the social media generation, it also highlighted its potentially toxic nature. The livetweets of both Demetrius (Maddy Parkes) and Lysander (George Goodman) offered uncomfortably misogynistic online alter-egos, with Hermia (Myra Lee Bell) and Helena (Annina Watton) shown supporting each other against the masculine brazen sexual entitlement. Having the characters’ inner thoughts become public on Twitter was a clever touch in both productions — but also an aspect that is lost for anyone watching after the premiere. Using YouTube’s Live Chat function to display the characters’ comments (as some other lockdown Shakespeare productions have) would have allowed the young lovers’ messages to be replayed any time the film is viewed, but may not have had the same impact as seeing them appear on Twitter. Ultimately, Fresh Life accepted livetweeting’s one-off nature for the sake of authenticity — an admirable decision, but one which is likely to make their update of the young lovers lose some depth for anyone who didn’t watch the films’ premieres.
The Lockdown Dream that has, for me, created the most successful set of socially distanced young lovers so far is that of The Back Room Shakespeare Project (BRSP). Filmed and edited entirely in isolation, the group’s adaptation arguably embraced the youth of the characters more than any other. Where Ctrl-Alt-Repeat made their lovers the most adept at Zoom, BRSP went a few steps further by creating a group of adolescents who believably lived much of their lives exclusively through technology even before lockdown. The film begins with a phonecall between the socially distanced Theseus (Samuel Taylor) and Hippolyta (Courtney Abbott), followed by a Zoom call instigated by Egeus (Lawrence Grimm) to have Theseus intervene as in the play in Hermia’s (Andrea Abello) refusal to marry Demetrius (Xavier Roe).
Aside from this moment, however, the young lovers are never seen on Zoom — instead shifting quickly and effortlessly for the rest of the narrative between FaceTime conversations with each other and recording Instagram Stories soliloquies. With BRSP’s mechanicals rehearsing and performing on Zoom much like Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s, the software is positioned as ‘entry level’ — used by a generation not familiar with regularly communicating through video technology. Coupled with some occasional modern additions and amendments to Shakespeare’s lines that purists may find hard to accept — such as Demetrius’s plea to Helena (Eric O’Shea): ‘I love thee not, therefore stop sending me friend requests’ — the distinction gave the young lovers a modern identity not achieved in other Lockdown Dreams. The titular couple of Romeo and Juliet are regularly updated on stage and screen to emphasise the relevance of their young love to teenage audience members; BRSP’s technological and textual embellishments feel as though they achieve something similar for Dream’s pairs of lovers.
Did BRSP’s recognisably technologically-saturated world resolve the issue of Act 3 Scene 2 which Gemma (and now I) have discussed on multiple occasions? Ultimately, no. Performed over FaceTime, the scene works thanks to the strong performances of the cast once again, but there’s no denying it still lacks the physical connection it truly requires to hit home — leaving the path clear for a future Lockdown Dream to try another solution. That said, BRSP’s Dream has demonstrated a way to make the young lovers genuinely stand out within a lockdown production of the play. Both they and Ctrl-Alt-Repeat have shown that fully embracing our current isolated existence can lead to satisfyingly engaging and authentic performances, as well as seeing the technology we’re using every day as tools and opportunities to give productions relevance, resonance and richness.
In my third article on ‘Lockdown Dreams’, I’ll focus on the ways the productions created so far have adapted and performed my favourite group within the play — the mechanicals —again exploring the ways technology has been used effectively in doing so.
¹ Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare (London, UK: Pelican Books). pp. 87, 88.
