A Midsummer Night’s Dream (review)

On 25 March, I joined Fred Abrahamse and company at the Artscape theatre complex to observe rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rehearsals were located high and deep inside the massive brutalist complex originally built by the Apartheid state to accommodate its performing arts parastatal¹ and large state-sponsored spectacles. The actors had been given a space the size of the opera stage in which to work, a “rehearsal room” for choruses and corps de ballet. Abrahamse and Meyer Productions (the director and his commercial partner) have in recent years carved out a niche in South Africa with Shakespeare scaled small for touring to schools and festivals. The last time the company performed at Artscape, their three-handed Richard III played to scattered audiences in the complex’s jerry-built side-of-theatre conversion. Now they were preparing to open on the main stage with a cast of fourteen. The rehearsal room presented a concrete and constant reminder of the problem of filling the physical and cultural space represented by the main stage.

Given this space, the rehearsal was casual, but not intimate. Half of the cast were present, rehearsing scenes involving the Athenian nobles: a development from small rehearsal work on “the lovers,” In the large room, and with the actors now rehearsing full scenes, focus and energy seemed to dissipate easily. When focus shifted from full ensemble to individual couples, actors accustomed to sustained, focused work with one or two others, drifted about “offstage” in corners. At very few moments did the restive actors grow still. These rare moments of collective attentiveness marked key points in the rehearsal process. By this rehearsal, the actors already had their blocking; and the session aimed to allow them to shrug off patterns that had become fixed and stilted, while setting down the overall shape of the group scenes (which here included two pieces of silent choreography: a wedding and a dumbshow). These aims pulled in opposite directions, making the rehearsal a little schizophrenic. But, in a couple of cases, changes to blocking and the relationship between bodies in the couples, produced effects that extended over the whole rehearsal.

Unusually, there were two observers present. Before starting work on the scenes, the actors were required to run through them for the project’s sound designer. This “run through” meant a slow, unfocused start for the actors, but it afforded a useful opportunity to see the production concept framed. While the actors took a break, the director conferred with the composer. This was a difficult discussion, and the only time where I felt the director might be uncomfortable with my presence in the rehearsal. It was evident, even with minimal stage properties, that the company was taking Shakespeare on Safari. Setting Midsummer Night’s Dream in a game park allowed the company to locate a fantasy space of animistic, mystical Africa cheek by jowl with the reality of commercial tourism. The game lodge, it seemed, was thus a neat (and neatly ironized) substitution for Athens and its wild, fantastical woods. But Abrahamse clearly wanted to preserve, rather than ironize, the fantasy vision of Africa, to extend it over the whole production, raising the question of the colonial fantasy preserved in a white Theseus’ lordship over the estate (not to mention a black Hippolyta). While I scrutinized the production’s publicity poster (a Zebra’s head featured prominently) and props (a Livingstone hat and animal skins), Abrahamse attempted to achieve consensus that the composer’s score would evoke Africa in a new idiom, without using African music. But the composer seemed surprised, then frustrated, unable to...