Shaking the Shibboleths of Shakespeare

Trish Lindström and Sarah Afful, as a variety of characters

Indeed, Peter Sellars’s production busts many myths that have been built up around the plays of William Shakespeare and how they are best done – myths that Stratford, you would think, has an institutional interest in maintaining.

So this is great news, because any artistic organization that doesn’t allow its shibboleths to be shaken from time to time will atrophy.

Get this: Sellars disperses a condensed text among just four actors, who take on the colorful cast of characters that define this magical, romantic play.

But Sellars’ production is not just a Dream – it’s a dream, and one that follows its own nocturnal logic. If you let it, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play does not flatten, but layer – creating a pleasing puzzle that allows audience members familiar with Shakespeare’s text to at once watch a production of the comedy that plays out in their memory, and a brand-new story dramatized before their eyes.

Reference: A Dream fulfilled: You have to see Stratford’s radical rethink of Shakespeare (emphasis, mine).

There may be an economic reason for the truncated cast, and if so, Sellars seems to have done a bang-up job of making it all work.