Lockdown Dreams Part 3: Zoomed Mechanicals
This is the third and final installment of my series of articles on lockdown adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Part one focused on the creation of magic, whilst part two explored updating the young lovers. In this final article, I’m turning my attention to the characters who are undoubtedly, and unashamedly, my favourites in the play — the mechanicals. Perhaps I enjoy them so much fundamentally for the same reasons that I often struggle to connect with the young lovers. The mechanicals as written could become a series of one-dimensional clowns in many of their scenes, but the most successful modern productions take the opportunity to craft them into much more rounded and idiosyncratic figures we can genuinely warm to.
This is perhaps truest during their starring role in Act 5, performing Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. On the page, the performance — and the interruptions of the courtiers throughout — is written as the nobles taking the opportunity to ridicule and belittle those of the working classes for their own amusement, and could still of course be performed that way. However, when writing about the productions of Dream that ran concurrently in London at the Bridge Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and Regents Park Open Air Theatre in the summer of 2019, I noted that ‘[p]resenting the mechanicals as being contemptuously mocked by the upper echelons of Athenian society is much less appealing today than reimagining them as a loveable group of amateurs to root for who, ultimately, succeed’. Whilst Regents Park opted for the former, the Bridge and Globe productions went for the more pleasing latter approach, and both felt much stronger as a result.
In her introduction to The Show Must Go Online’s (TSMGO) Dream, Grace Ioppolo overtly referenced Peter Brook’s 1970 production of the play as a landmark in moving Dream away from being seen as ‘cute’ and towards much darker reimaginings. Whilst Regents Park’s Dream last year very much went with a Brook-style menacing interpretation, both the Globe and Bridge went the opposite way, presenting Dreams full of colour, music and joy. The articles we wrote at (Re)thinking Shakespeare during our ‘Rethinking Dream’ series last year were in little doubt that the lighter approach was the one which felt more suited to our twenty-first century moment. With the exception of Fresh Life Theatre’s pair of films, those creating lockdown Dreams have also overwhelmingly stayed away from darker interpretations in favour of what Gemma described in relation to Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s production as ‘hopeful and light-hearted Dream[s] for a world that could do with the sort of alternate reality pick-me-up only theatre can deliver’.
As they regularly are on stage, the mechanicals have continually been central to this lighter, joyous approach to Lockdown Dreams. From their first appearance in TSMGO’s Dream, Rob Myles’s versions of the mechanicals were evocative of classic cartoons. Myles’s own performance in the role of Bottom was strongly influenced by any number of Tex Avery characters, complete with exaggerated movements, rubberfaced expressions and seemingly endless energy. Mark McMinn’s tam-o’-shantered and perpetually peckish Snout was equally cartoonish, feeling ripped from the pages of The Beano rather than vintage animation. Viewing the mechanicals within the recognisable frames of a Zoom conference felt pleasingly apt, echoing the comic strips and small screen shorts from which they appeared to have escaped. Myles’s decision to use a Snapchat-style filter for Bottom’s transformation — giving himself the unmistakeable head of Donkey from the animated Shrek film series — also felt joyously in keeping with their cartoon roots.
However, the madcap exuberance of Myles’s mechanicals meant that his fidelity to the traditional mockery of Pyramus and Thisbe unfortunately felt all the more uneasy. After nervously delivering the prologue, Peter Quince (Gabrielle Sheppard) awkwardly remained on screen, barely hiding his embarrassment as the courtiers snootily delivered their criticism as voiceover. Starveling (Andrew Yabroff) was less willing to let their comments slide, performing his first speech as Moonshine timidly but then responding to their interruptions with obvious irritation. Leonard Cook’s delivery of Theseus’s line ‘No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse’ (5.1.346–347) was overtly condescending, but unsurprisingly so by that point. Myles’s characterisation of both the courtiers and the mechanicals worked well separately elsewhere in the production, but putting the two groups together in the play’s final act and sticking with the traditional class divide unfortunately struck a mean-spirited note. I was reminded of Emma Rice’s Dream at the Globe in 2016, which similarly set the mechanicals up as caricatured figures of the theatre’s own volunteer stewards throughout the production. Rice subjected her mechanicals to severe derision and mockery from the nobles during Pyramus and Thisbe, giving her largely festive production a jarringly uncomfortable conclusion.
Sid Phoenix resolved the issue of the nobles’ derision of the mechanicals in Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s Midsummer Night Stream in arguably the boldest way possible by cutting their interruptions entirely. With the production set in a recognisable version of our current world, Phoenix’s mechanicals were established as actors who had landed a gig performing via Zoom at Theseus (Adam Blake) and Hippolyta’s (Anna Sambrooks) online nuptials. In contrast to TSMGO’s Peter Quince, Tom Black’s version of the character delivered the opening prologue with confidence, allowing Phoenix’s decision to remove the nobles’ derision of his performance to make sense from the off. Whilst the rest of the group were notably and deliberately more amateurish than Quince, they too were allowed to take centre stage during Pyramus and Thisbe as plucky underdogs whose performances, whilst exaggerated and somewhat silly, were undoubtedly commendable.
Starveling (James Dillon) self-deprecatingly took on the role of Wall by performing the first half of the mechanicals’ play in his Zoom window as a stick man puppet show, with Bottom (Joanna Brown) and Flute (Olivia Caley) enthusiastically providing voiceover from their windows. The decision was both inspired and wonderfully in keeping with the wider production’s metamodern low-tech sensibility — a reading of Stream I discussed in more detail in my first article. Of course, the show couldn’t go entirely swimmingly: Quince looked on mortified and Starveling barely contained his laughter as first Bottom chose to rap Pyramus’s dying soliloquy, then Flute broke into an operatic rendition of Thisbe’s subsequent speech. Whilst the young lovers’ applause was politely restrained, Theseus initially seemed bewildered by what he had just watched — but, importantly, his call for ‘No epilogue’ was undoubtedly appreciative of the group’s efforts.
The Back Room Shakespeare Project’s (BRSP) Dream took a similar approach to Ctrl-Alt-Repeat: they overtly set their production in lockdown, and the mechanicals became a group of actors rehearsing and performing over Zoom. However, whilst Pyramus and Thisbe was again performed without audience interruption, the group came up with an ingenious way to allow a modernised version of the courtiers’ commentary to take place. In keeping with their tech-saturated Dream, Pyramus and Thisbe became a ‘YouTube-video-within-a-YouTube-video’ complete with premiere countdown clock and Live Chat sidebar. It was here that Theseus (Samuel Taylor), Hippolyta (Courtney Abbott) and the young lovers offered their comments — albeit mostly in modern English — as they came together for a ‘watch party’. Whilst some of their early Live Chat comments echoed the derision of the play’s interruptions, by the end of the mechanicals’ performance the courtiers had undoubtedly been won over, with several characters messaging to say they felt genuinely moved. Theseus desperately tried (and failed) to find the ‘clap emoji’ to show his appreciation, and encouraged those watching to donate ‘actual money’ as ‘those actual actors had their actual industry get destroyed’.
Between them, BRSP and Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s adaptations of this moment reminded me most of Theseus’s (Oliver Chris) affectively sincere response to the joyously enthusiastic Pyramus and Thisbe performed at the conclusion of the Bridge’s Dream last year. Theseus’s response in BRSP’s Dream best highlights the key reason why the choice of not having the courtiers belittle the mechanicals feels even more fitting now than it did a year ago. The group are intrinsically metatheatrical — actors being played by actors, performing a play within the play. In Lockdown Dreams, the mechanicals inherently come to represent the real actors who are playing them, struggling just as often as succeeding with the new technology they are faced with — both Ctrl-Alt-Repeat and BRSP featured mechanicals accidentally ‘muting’ themselves during the performance.
In these Lockdown Dreams, the mechanicals are less the ‘Hard-handed men that work in Athens here / Which never laboured in their minds till now’ (5.1.72–3), but modern-day actors adapting to new forms of creative expression and coming to terms with the paralysis of their industry — which is, of course, the reason Lockdown Dreams have come into existence at all. Gemma and I have both accepted and celebrated the roughness of Lockdown Shakespeare; it is far more satisfying to see the courtiers, existing in a recognisable version of 2020 and watching Zoom performances of Pyramus and Thisbe, do the same.
As a conclusion to this series of three articles on A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed in lockdown, I’d like to return to a question I posed in the first part: what’s the reason Dream has emerged as the Shakespeare play of choice for actors to create anew in our current locked down world? I previously suggested, and have now argued, that the contrasting realms and different groups — the fairies, the courtiers, the mechanicals — give actors and directors more opportunities to experiment than most of Shakespeare’s works. But maybe there’s something else too. Maybe one of Shakespeare’s most fantastical plays is best suited to reflecting our current world out of joint. For some, waking up each day in lockdown no doubt feels like wading through a surreal dream — as if viewing the world, to borrow Hermia’s phrase, ‘with parted eye’ (4.1.188).
Each group within Dream in some way baffles the other two — the young lovers even confound the elder courtiers at the start of the play, creating further disconnect. But at the end of the final act, Shakespeare harmonises the previously disparate groups — brought together through love, acceptance and even a little magic. Similarly, living in lockdown has arguably pushed people to connect more with others, in many cases with people they may not have connected with otherwise. This is undoubtedly at the heart of lockdown theatre — as Rob Myles has said of his reasons for staging Shakespeare online each week, ‘the whole point of this is community and connectedness’. The fact that being with other people cannot currently be taken for granted has arguably made it even more important to connect with each other however we can, even if it takes technology — whether indistinguishable from magic or not — to do so.
