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Finding a winner at Bosworth
Sleeping Partners: James Sanderson (Oberon), Kyle Horne (Titania) Giles Stoakley (Bottom) and Christopher Finn (Puck) A Midsummer Night's Dream Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre Sutton Cheney, Leicestershire **** This astoundingly
high-class company relishes this kind of quick-change marvel, Bosworth is a super, intimate venue - grassy and
sloping, nicely tucked around the Visitor Centre; and this was another
galvanising Festival Players production: an again all-male, six-man
Midsummer Night's Dream, produced by accomplished actor-director
Dyer (formerly of Minack Theatre fame) with a remarkably tight hand -
yet in such a way that his young cast, apprentices, one might call them,
have latitude to stamp their sparky personalities upon sometimes three
roles at a time. Their genial Bottom, Giles Stoakley is also the
roadie who keeps the show on the move – and the number of venues the
ensemble visits, unpacking, setting up and packing up again after every
show, is almost frightening: indeed they cover virtually all the UK
(though the South East, curiously, gets short shrift).
Stoakley's impressive Egeus (the mythical Aegeus,
a role nicely pumped up by assuming that of major-domo Philostrate) and
very presentably, unusually upper-middle-class Bottom (are Weavers
perhaps one up the ladder above Carpenters and Leather-dealers?) produce
delicious moments: not just when Pyramus is endlessly refusing to die
(no exchange with the courtiers, but he somehow makes up), but in the
donkey's head scenes, not least when he is Fairy-fanned. Those Fairies run off with the laurels, not so
much because of agreeable James Sanderson's slightly under defined
Oberon. Sanderson gets the play off to a resplendent start as Theseus
opposite Christopher Mark.. The latter Hippolyta verges on tiresome, but
not as much as his Helen(a), whom Marks masterfully turns into a
colossal bore while managing to make the interminable lovers' tiffs
interesting. Christopher Finn's quick-change Puck is one
treasure of the Fairy crew, and his high-pitched Hermia is also a joy,
never setting a foot wrong. If this staging has pace, it's not least
because Finn is such a deft MC, brisk, endlessly entertaining and
strikingly diverse and clever in range. Some actors, even young ones,
can hold audiences in the palm of their hand, and Finn looks like one. But even Puck got upstaged, just, by Mark's
reappearance in role three, as Mustardseed, feyly diverting every time
he appeared; and by Joel Daffurn (a good workaday Lysander, later a
divinely wet Flute/Thisbe, and here a charming, graceful Peaseblossom).
Both this Fairy duo and Oberon gain from some eerily expressive, gilt
Greek masks, by Hannah Ruddock, which simply oozed mystery and
But one was caught on the hop by the arrival of
the real diva and star of this tautly worked, wittily
entertaining show. Kyle Horne proffers a brittle, rather striking
Demetrius, contriving to make a lover's (or despiser's) role that can
seem tedious and ponderous quite cogent and credible.
But it is when Horne resurfaces in the most
expressive, evocative, ambiguous gold mask of all, as an astonishingly
sensual, pliable Titania fusing sexiness and a strange, gossamer,
childlike purity and innocence, that one is simply gobsmacked. The
passivity, one might even say attainability, of him/her acquiescing in,
treasuring, eliding into others' (whoever's) embrace, the silken
elasticity Horne invests waist and neck, thigh and shoulder with, melt
one away. It is as if the strangely elusive, desirable
oriental ‘changeling boy' whom Oberon so dotes on, like some fledgling
Miles to his knowing Peter Quint, is merged into Titania: as if Titania
herself might almost – one must emphasise the almost, for this like the
play is a tentative fancy - be a boy, and donkey-dong Bottom no more
than ‘her' piece of rough trade. One has seen many a lustable-after Titania in
Shakespeare, and not least in Britten's opera – few more than the
delectable Rebecca Bottone for British Youth Opera. But Horne K,
consciously or not, poses more questions about identity and inclination
than many another I can recall. This is before one praises the superlatively
funny mechanicals' play (to which Horne contributes a ludicrous unlikely
Snug/Lion). Sanderson again sets the tone with his classic, desperately
aspiring, managerial Quince. Finn, abetted by uncredited late night
moonshine lighting, is an amusing though perhaps not ideally cast
Starveling. Mark's Snout/Wall is a hoot, and the props clever and
deliciously old fashioned: most looked to be fashioned out of hay. But the joy here is Daffurn's Thisbe – Flute is a
dangerous role, for such expectations are placed on Thisbe it is easy to
foul up. No danger here. Clamping himself, knotting himself round
Stoakley's spacious prostrate body, Daffurn manages to be sexy too,
turning the Greek mini-drama into something of a parody of the main
events. Given that can often seem funny but semi-detached, this is no
mean feat for an actor. And it's this kind of stringy detail that makes
Dyer's scrupulously well-orchestrated production a joy at every turn.
Johnny Coppin's song settings are steeped in the kind of Renaissance and
pre-Renaissance folk tradition these yokels might have known and sung
had this been 14th century and not eleventh century BC. They
could have warbled them better, their spoken delivery being so
superlative, but Coppin is such a master of creating modern-folk fusions
that all the music – a little more might have been nice - sounded
gloriously apt. I had not heard of the Festival Players Company
prior to this. But I shall make sure I catch their future stagings. With
a tour as extensive as this, it would be difficult not to stumble across
them in any part of the country. If they're a tenth as good as this, I
shall be amply rewarded. Touring with Romeo and Juliet to Sunday 18
August. Macbeth and The Comedy of Errors will follow in
2014.
www.thefestivalplayers.org.uk
MIDLAND DATES
Thu 4 July The New Fri 9 Sat 10 Aug
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