Reviewed by Malcolm Calder
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Royal New Zealand Ballet
Choreography – Liam Scarlett
Music – Felix Mendelssohn
Music Arranger – Nigel Gaynor
Set & Costume Design – Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting Design – Kendall Smith
Conductor – Hamish McKeich
Orchestra – Auckland Philharmonia
Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre (until Dec 8)
Then Bruce Mason Theatre, Takapuna
OK, Shakespeare started all this theatrical fantasy stuff more than 4 centuries back when he developed some of the Greeks’ allegorical reflections on love and its mythical interpretations by writing A Midsummer Night’s.
It has a convoluted and fantastical plot that epitomises the suspension of disbelief and is perfectly suited to the meandering minds of creatives. So they did.
A young Felix Mendelssohn had an initial stab at expressing it musically before King William Frederick IV convinced him to enhance his music further as accompaniment to a theatrical staging where it became a favourite of the Prussian court.
I have no idea what William Blake was on when he expressed Shakespeare’s work visually a century later, nor the mindset of various theatre and even movie directors as the original was variously interpreted until eventually becoming a stock in trade for theatre over a couple of centuries. Little wonder then that it would evolve much later into a significant full-length ballet that is commonly attributed to Georges Ballanchine – apparently a fairly tame interpretation by contemporary standards. Eventually The Royal New Zealand Ballet was to be congratulated on collaborating in 2015 with the fairly progressive Queensland Ballet in a completely new interpretation devised by the even more weirdly wonderful and progressive mind of the late Liam Scarlett.
Mendelssohn’s original incidental music was skillfully re-arranged and expanded by former RNZB Music Director Nigel Gaynor and, with an innovative set and a costume design by the distinguishd Tracy Grant Lord, the result was a full-length two-act contemporary ballet that audiences greeted with joyous rapture.
A subsequent 2021 season was rudely interrupted by Covid and this Dream only played in Wellington. However it has finally toured nationally and reached Auckland where those earlier plaudits can ring even more true today. This Midsummer Night’s Dream is something that makes one wallow in pure enjoyment.
Yes, of course the threads of serious Greek allegory on humankind are not lost, but it is the telling of the tale that makes this production so outstanding and to marvel at what Liam Scarlett, and the team he headed, has produced.
Firstly, lets look at Tracy Grant Lord’s set. This combines colour and texture that, when coupled with Kendall Smith’s lighting, results almost as if an additional dimension has somehow been added to the stage. There is a depth and a height and a breadth that I could swear somehow exceed the theatre’s stage dimensions. This dimensionality is exploited to the fullest in the choreography and the costumes that somehow reinforce the set rather than the other way around. It is night. It is a woodland. It is ethereal. It is enchanted. It is a place where subtlety, confusion and a comedy of errors are rife. It is actually the inside of someone’s mind.
That is largely achieved and certainly enhanced by Nigel Gaynor’s sympathetic musical arrangement of Mendelsson’s sumptuous score and which itself defies traditional convention. Off-stage voices are introduced under Hamish McKeich’s baton and I could swear I heard someone humming along during the triumphal Wedding March.
The ballet opens with an imperious Oberon (Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson) and his compellingly superior Queen Titania (Ana Gallardo Lobaina), assisted by his energetic and whimsical sprite Puck (Shaun James Kelly) who attempt to influence and even thwart the course of true love via the use of a supposedly magical pixie dust. When sprinkled this confuses things a bit and just about everyone on stage loses track of who is love with whom. There is whimsy and humour around each and every corner and the characterisations are superb – none more so than Bottom (Calum Gray) who magically develops a donkey’s head and tail.
The characterisations are superb, the detail in the dancing shows real connections and Liam Scarlett’s stunning choreography is built around fluidity and motion that blurs fantasy with reality and gives us something unexpected at each turn. Just as one is starting to relax after a particular marvellous pas de deux, for example, this Dream slides effortlessly into something equally ethereal albeit several feet in the air serving only to amplify, elevate and unify the whole.
Plotwise … no, I won’t bother you with the complexities … suffice to say it all becomes totally confusing but love wins out in the end. Of course. And the donkey is human underneath it all – a message for all of us.
This Midsummer Night’s Dream is indeed a sparkling, spectacular ballet of sheer theatrical magic that is a Christmas treat for audiences everywhere
New Zealand Arts Review 