‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ opens Arts Festival

Standing left to right: Adam Green, Sara Topham, Dion Johnstone. Seated: Michael Kahn (left) and Ethan McSweeny

Tomorrow night and Sunday night, the Shakespeare Theatre Company will perform productions of the playwright’s famous “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as part of the kick-off for the Macao Arts Festival.
Five guests from the Shakespeare Theatre Company spoke with the media yesterday to share their excitement over what is the company’s first production in China.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a comedy portraying the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta. The events that unfold include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors, known as the mechanicals, who are controlled and manipulated by fairies. It remains one of Shakespeare’s most popular works for the stage and is widely performed around the world.
“The play has three themes, or worlds,” said Ethan McSweeny, the director of the production. “The world of fairies, the world of lovers and the court, [along with] the world of the mechanicals, including the working class people who [in the play] are preparing an amateur theater production. My goal was to make the show work well across all three rings of the circus,” he explained.
Canadian performers Sara Topham and Dion Johnstone, who portray the characters of Titania and Oberon respectively, were present at the meeting. American actor Adam Green, who plays the notorious and mischievous character, Puck, and is described by McSweeny as “absolutely irreplaceable” in the role, also attended. “This [invitation] is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us,” said Green.
Coinciding with the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death this year, the performance tomorrow night will mark the company’s debut in China.
“Macau is so multicultural and our production will be translated into Cantonese and Portuguese,” said McSweeny in response to a question about the accessibility of the play to non-native English speakers. “Shakespeare’s plays are universal so it’s our job to just perform them and not to try to adapt it for the local culture.”
“There is a universality of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and there are some comic aspects that I think you don’t need to speak English to understand. You could watch it on mute and understand what is going on. To be able to watch it with the sound off is very possible,” said actor Adam Green.
Speaking in response to the same question, Sara Topham said: “I think the reason that we keep doing Shakespeare across cultures is because every girl has had the experience of having a boy not love her back. This is true of girls in Canada, China and Washington D.C. Unrequited love is the same around the world.”
But whether the performers will get the same reactions from the play’s humor in Macau as they do in the United States remains to be seen, McSweeny said.
“I think on Saturday we will learn a lot. Maybe some things that we thought were funny might turn out not to be…” he joked.
Recipient of the 2012 Regional Theatre Tony Award, the Shakespeare Theatre Company is a leading classical production house in the U.S. Today it is synonymous with artistic excellence, according to a statement from the IC, and renowned for making classical theatre more accessible to audiences around Washington D.C., where the company is based.
The company performs through 48 weeks of the year from late-August to mid-July, annually producing three Shakespeare plays and four adaptations by American writers of European plays and historical plays from around the world.
IC representatives say that the show has been sold out during the “early period, within the first week or so.” Daniel Beitler