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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Upon a time, before the faery broods
Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,
Before King Oberon’s bright diadem,
Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem,
Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns
From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip’d lawns…
(John Keats) |
In Act ii Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania, the
queen of the fairies, berates her husband Oberon with the fact that the
natural world is in chaos. The Earth is full of floods, winter is
summer, disease abounds… and all because neither of them can
bear to relinquish something that, really, can be owned by neither of
them. Thus grasping materialism twists reality, and freedom is
corrupted even within itself…
The Comrise production of A Midsummer Nights Dream was performed in the
autumn of 2005, a year when the equinoctial shifting was deeper,
restless, more ancient. It came in many moves and motions, bringing
with it all kinds of things - filaments of circling leaves, a sliver of
ice in the bones, increased activity, rushing, sudden change. A drift
of cold under the door, waking you up, making things feel a bit
different.
Then, we were still The Compromise Theatre, developing and getting to
know the full extent of our creative feet… our understanding of
ourselves developed along with our next production, this time staged at
the right time of year with the children of St Paul’s School in
Haringey. The play was an enormous success and soon afterwards the
“prom” was dropped from Compromise and we became Comrise
– it felt right, somehow. Pictures from our
children’s production should be available soon, but it the
meantime a permanent workshop has been set up in the school and a
diverse package of workshops and interactive performances are now
available – to find out more check out The Roving Troupe.
We haven’t quite finished yet with A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and there is so much more we would like to say about how our
singular vision of the play is continuing to develop. The potential for
conceptual exploration is limitless within the woods, where Dionysus
lurks in a realm of primal, unconscious celebration and Apollo rules
fantasy and misapprehension. We would love to talk of empirical
construction, and how, if we could really remove all it’s layers,
we might find a real truth that is close enough for kissing to the
world of the faeirie.
We can go on about the sublime in Shakespeare,
about how even the borders between Romanticism and romanticism, between
zeitgeist and zeitgeist are ephemeral and easily able to flow into each
other, if you look at from the right angle with the sun on your face.
But it would take ages, and pages, so for anybody who is interested,
email us and we’ll send you a more detailed explanation of it all.
Our final production of this play will be taking place around the
Winter Solstice, and it will be extraordinary! Full information will
become available soon so do contact us so we can let you know the where
and the when!
Borders are shifting, the seasons are altering, the winter frosts touch the summer, beauty and horror go hand in hand…
Images From A Midsummer Night’s Dream, October 2006.
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