NOW is the autumn of our English bard. No fewer than five of Shakespeare’s finest are in the repertoire across Scotland this season, if you include the Macbeth that has just brought down the final curtain on the famous Little Theatre in Mull. If that slimmed-down tragedy, with just five actors, was all smoke and mirrors to enhance the tiny space, this dark comedy at Dundee is all smoke on the water.
A decade or so ago, Robert Lepage directed a production of the Dream at the National Theatre in London on a floor of slithery mud. It became known as the Dirty Dream. Dominic Hill’s production here might get dubbed the Wet Dream if he’s not careful.
Both Lepage and Hill rely on Titania’s speech at the beginning of Act II where she claims that Oberon’s infidelities have put the seasons out of joint. It might be midsummer but the weather in Dundee is dreadful.
The roof of Theseus’s palace is leaking from all the rain and, in the dank wood, mist drifts across the standing pools. The wide expanse of wooden floor, which is more or less all of Naomi Wilkinson’s set, tilts down towards the front of the stalls. What with the constant rain, it is a slippery slope in every sense, down which events career at gathering speed. That all makes sense here for Kevin Lennon’s grimy, feral Puck, and the Mechanicals get some laughs out of having their rehearsals rained on.
But the lovers’ damp wooing seems long on shouting and rushing about and a bit short on the transforming power of true love, despite what one might interpret as their baptismal duckings in the pools and consequent rebirths. In fact, all the relationships seem as provisional as that between Bottom and Titania. Hippolyta begins by dreading her union with Theseus, and still does not seem entirely convinced at the end. The nuptials are an edgy affair, the lovers still not entirely sure of each other.
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For a play that is usually seen to celebrate the union of lovers, this is a challenging reading. Hill’s stagecraft is such that he might get away with it if the performances were less uneven. Kim Gerard and Cameron Mowat, the two young recruits this season to Dundee’s standing repertory company, do better as Hermia and Lysander than their more experienced counterparts. Irene MacDougall’s regal Titania overshadows Okon Ubanga-Jones’s Oberon. Fortunately, the Mechanicals remain a reliable joy.
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