Alternate Title School-Time Performance / School Tour: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Premiere US Premiere
Production Language English
Country of Origin England, United Kingdom
Description Includes Post-performance Discussion.
During the spring 2009 run of Propeller’s production of The Merchant of Venice, the troupe also presented three school-day performances of another play it was running in repertoire, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Propeller’s Midsummer had been performed at BAM in 2004, and was reprised as part of BAM’s Education programs for grades 7-12.
As Dominic Cavendish wrote of this production in The Telegraph, “Edward Hall hasn’t gathered a cast of androgynous young men in dainty likeness of the ‘boy players’ of Shakespeare’s day. When he gets his cast to cross-dress, they still look like thirtysomething blokes.”
In a program note, Artistic Director Hall wrote: “We want to discover Shakespeare simply by doing the plays, as we believe they should be done: with great clarity, speed, and full of as much imagination in the staging as possible. We don’t want to make the plays ‘accessible’ as this implies that they need ‘dumbing down’ in order to be understood, which they don’t. We want to continue to take our work to as many different kinds of audiences as possible and to grow as artists and people.” The performances included a post-performance discussion with the cast. Includes post-performance artist Q&A.
Identifier 2009s.01308
