Moving Festival Shakespeare Online: 60 Hour Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Stream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is fast becoming a staple of made-for-Lockdown Shakespeare, with the latest production being offered by Reading-based theatre company 60 Hour Shakespeare. Dream was to be the company’s third annual charity production. The concept is simple: the company rehearse for only 60 hours and then perform, raising money for a chosen charity. With COVID-19 scuppering their planned outdoor performance, 60 Hour Shakespeare decided to take the production online as A Midsummer Night’s Stream, broadcasting live to YouTube on Monday 25 May — what would’ve been the original picnic production date. The format was much the same as we have seen from other Lockdown Shakespeare creators such as The Show Must Go Online and Ctrl-Alt-Repeat. Directed by Gavin Light, the actors worked in isolation on a Zoom conference, switching from ‘gallery’ to ‘speaker’ view as necessary.
The company relied on virtual backgrounds to create the inter-war setting of the production and a sense of shared environments. It is a credit to the globally-dispersed company that they succeeded in gathering costumes that created a clear aesthetic. The nobles were transported from Athens to a very British stately home — perhaps a nod to the company’s usual performance space at Caversham Court Gardens in Reading. Coupled with the mechanicals reimagined as a traveling circus, complete with ringmaster Peter Quince (Tomás Sergeant), there was a clear sense of nostalgia for a traditional British summer of picnics and Pimms.
Notwithstanding technical issues — the play was late starting, and Georgie Smith as Helena at times succumbed to the foibles of wi-fi — the production was slick and secure, the cast uniformly strong. This was clearly a production designed with the picnic show format in mind that had been transplanted into a Zoom format. As a result, at times it felt a little flat — there was no attempt to place the world of the play within our socially distanced moment, and with no reason for characters not to be together it felt at times a more like a reading rather than a performance. Uniform virtual backgrounds, while offering a shortcut to creating a sense of shared space, are ultimately jarring. They don’t move, actors glitch around the edges, and they are unavoidably fake. Here the same forest image was used for all forest scenes; it would have been nice to have had some variation, particularly to differentiate between the different groups of people and different types of action.
Ultimately, for me, the use of uniform virtual backgrounds creates dissonance. Rather than the world of the play being presented to me, I need to overcome the inconsistencies. By way of example, the nobles all used the same image of a function room set for a wedding in the final act — however, the nature of Zoom meant that all the characters were seemingly standing in exactly same spot. I was reminded of similar scenes in Creation Theatre’s productions. For the final reveal in their production of The Tempest, for example, the characters were brought to Prospero’s library. In that scene, the same backdrop was used but presented from different angles, making the world creation feel more successful as a result.
The production was at its most successful when the actors played with the constraints of Zoom. This was most noticeable with the lovers, who offered stand-out performances. At the risk of repeating myself, the love-drugged four-way lovers fight is for me never going to work in a Zoom format. However, Helena (Georgie Smith) and Hermia’s (Kat Dulfer) performances in this scene exploited the nuances of acting in a small frame to great success. The focus moved away from the testosterone-fuelled showboating of Demetrius (Kieran Donnelly) and Lysander (Ant Henson), and instead switched the gaze to the female emotion. Reacting to Lysander’s verbal attack on Hermia, the two female lovers worked in opposition: the close crop of Hermia’s face brought her vulnerability to the fore; while Helena, stepping away from the camera and using her arms to shield herself, acted as a physical rejection of Lysander’s inappropriate attack. Similarly, Puck (Lucy-Mae Humphries) and Titania’s (Noelle Adames) fleet of fairies fared well in a Zoom format. Clad in festival chic, and holding a smaller ‘Barbie’ fairy playing Mustardseed, they exploited the freedom that being ephemeral offers — ducking out of shot and peaking in at the sides of the screen. While this may have been an attempt to show them behaving differently to the mortals, the effect was to inject a sense of movement — it was a welcome contrast to the more staid presentation of Oberon (Deesh Mariwala) and Titania who, for the most part, adopted a static regal stance.
Where 60 Hour Shakespeare’s production was at its best was when it embraced the format, using the single camera single actor constraints of Zoom to its advantage. Where this wasn’t the case, it was in places a little dull and static — a series of side-by-side actors facing forward saying lines will never be that riveting, no matter how well those lines are spoken. Similarly, the production attempted to emulate a traditional theatre experience with a lengthy interval of around fifteen minutes. This wasn’t needed: the Ctrl-Alt-Repeat model of a quick pause works better and is more likely to retain viewers. Obviously, these are comments more on the genre than on this particular Dream, as given the time constraints and the ‘plan B’ nature of this production it was never the company’s intention to push at the edges of what is possible. What is clear is that if larger theatre companies want to move into virtual theatre, it will not be as simple as transferring existing productions into this new format.
60 Hour Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Stream is available to watch on the company’s YouTube channel. It is free to watch, but as a charity performance the company encourage donations to their chosen charity, No5 Young People.
Production Details:
A Midsummer Night’s Stream
Presented by 60 Hour Shakespeare via Zoom (streamed via YouTube), 25 May, 2020. Directed by Gavin Light. With Deesh Mariwala (Theseus/Oberon), Noelle Adames (Hippolyta/Titania), Paul Ansdell (Egeus), Jemma Stephens (Philostrate), Ant Henson (Lysander), Kat Dulfer (Hermia), Kieran Donnelly (Demetrius), Georgie Smith (Helena), Tomás Sergeant (Quince), Mathew Hunt (Bottom), Lola Beal (Flute), Caroline Taylor (Snug), Miriam Gibson (Starveling/Snout), Lucy-Mae Humphries (Puck), Olivia Thomson (Peaseblossom/Fairy), Marlena Rożek (Cobweb/Second Fairy), Ilaria Diotallevi (Moth/First Fairy), Barbie Mattel (Mustardseed).
