A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. To 25 August.
Polzeath/Edinburgh.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare.
Footsbarn Theatre Tour to 25 August 2008.
10-12, 15, 17-19, 24-26 July 8pm 13, 20, 27 July 6pm Footsbarn Tent, Carruan Farm Centre Polzeath Cornwall 0845 094 0428 www.crbo.co.uk
then 1-4, 6-11, 13-18, 20-25 August 7.30pm.
Footsbarn Tent, Calton Hill Edinburgh 0131 623 3030 www.edfringe.com
Runs 2hr No interval,
Review: Timothy Ramsden 22 June at Tocil Field, Warwick Arts Centre.
Footsbarn return, a generation on.
Footsbarn has been travelling with its Shakespeare shows for over 30 years (they began in Cornwall with pieces based on local legends). But time’s moved on faster than this company. Their amalgam of heavily-edited script, colourful costume and light, plus live, folk-inflected music, came across once as a theatrically alert alternative to word-based traditions.
It’s harder for this style to seem provocative in the age of Lepage, Complicite, Filter and a longish list of others. Even the capacious Footsbarn tent now has to contend with the novelties of site-specific productions. The company today seems like a survival of another age, its performance style familiar to the point of dowdy, lacking the gleaming newness of other major companies.
Even the international cast no longer has much cachet, while mid-period Peter Brook and Lindsay Kemp’s seventies total theatre pieces were pegging Footsbarn’s style into history even in their early years.
Modern theatre technology, which allows so much to be done comparatively cheaply, means anything they can do, other are doing better – or simply newer. Yet it’s the period-piece aspects that work best. They may seem very familiar, but the music (real players, real musical instruments), the grass underfoot where the small stage spills into a performing space round the front audience-members, are the low-tech high-points in a performance style with often ponderous speech and laboured comedy.
Footsbarn, to be fair, aren’t trying to rival others, they’re re-ploughing their own furrow, and though their consistency can seem like complacency, the apparent complacency also represents consistency. And there are plenty of audiences around who don’t regularly come across Brook, Lepage etc.
Even in this magic-laden play, Footsbarn’s human-scale, the sense of a company fully involved with each other, colours the performance. Stratford, say, or Shakespeare’s Globe may be offering more penetrating interpretations, with a lighter-mannered presentational style. But Footsbarn’s colour and music keep an appeal.
Never more than at the end when, despite truncating yet more poetic dialogue, the musicians join the Pyramus and Thisbe actors in a slow, unusually sad parade making the transition from courtly celebrations to nocturnal stillness poignant and seamless.
Actors: Joey Cunningham, Vincent Gracieux, Paddy Hayter, Caroline Piette, Muriel Piquart, Mas Soegeng, Akemi Yamauchi.
Musicians: Chandran Veyattummal, Pawel Paluch.
2008-07-10 10:40:49