A Midsummer Night's Dream

This is what scholars call a radical interpretation of the text.

This review contains spoilers for the play and for this production in general.

I'm sure that as soon as it was announced that Russell T. 'Doctor Who' Davies would direct a new version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, somewhere in the darkest recesses of Daily Mailtown some blind, mad ultraconservative seer began howling that it was the beginning of the end for Shakespeare and all Shakespeare would henceforth be gay (like that's never been done before.) When it was revealed that it would indeed feature a lesbian kiss, the same corners of the internet frothed predictably, and I just want to remind them that in Shakespeare's time the pay would have featured a lot of dudes kissing dudes. I'm just saying.

It's not a conventional setting.

Anyway...

Tradition is that Dream be set in a time and place redolent with romance. The golden age of Hollywood, 19th century Tuscany, fin de siecle Paris or even, should inspiration fail entirely, a blend of mythical Athens and late 16th Century England. Davies opts for that most romantic of milieus, a near-future fascist Athenian dictatorship, one masked Vigilante short of V for Vendetta, where moonlight flits are planned on touchscreens and Duke Theseus' intention to wed Hippolyta is an act of conquest against a woman kept under tighter security than Hannibal Lecter.

The Mechanicals: Fisayo Akinade, Javone Prince, Richard Wilson, Elaine
Paige and Bernard Cribbins. Not in this shot, Matt Lucas as Bottom.

John Hannah plays Theseus as a sneering villain, lording over his captive bride (Eleanor Matsuura,) yet in fear of her contained power, forcing her to read her romantic lines at gunpoint from an autocue. Egeus (Colin McFarlane) and Demetrius (Paapa Essiedu) are clearly both part of Theseus' establishment, while Lysander (Matthew Tennyson) is a bespectacled academic fleeing this harsh regime with Hermia. Hermia and Helena (Prisca Bakare and Kate Kennedy) are well cast, with a clear six inch height difference and Helena not portrayed as the minger.

Titania's fairies sport pretty butterfly wings, and they will fuck you up.

Beneath these worthies of course are the mechanicals, with their play. A wonderful mix of old luvvies and newer talent, headed by Matt Lucas' Bottom (as it were,) they bring the necessary quality of absolute sincerity to their roles. In the finale, Davies chooses to interpret Theseus' criticisms as barbed heckling, with the dark visual addition of the Duke crossing each player who answers his heckles off his ipad, contrasting their honest love for city and Duke with his utter disdain and disregard for their lives.

And then there are the fairies. Maxine Peake is a strident, muscular presence as the Amazonian Titania, while the often lissom Oberon is played by Nonso Anozi (something of a favourite in my house, thanks to his appearance in Cinderella.) The lesser faeries are a wild mob, and unlike many version, end the play by literally invading the palace of Theseus to overthrow the tyrant, not for a night of wildness, but for good. The design of Athens is nifty, but the design on the faeries is triumphant, blending elements of Middle Earth, Braveheart and Lost Boys.

Also awesome in Dracula, playing an atypical Renfield.

Shakespeare's text was a gentle rebellion - as a royally sponsored playwright he'd have been a fool to get too anarchic - but Davies is working in the twenty-first century, so he can go the whole hog, and the wild, vital fey bring Athens a release from the oppression of Theseus by delivering a wedding gift of a fatal coronary. This liberation is made literal in Hippolyta, whom Titania frees from her straight jacket (and the straight jacket of society,) to reveal her as Titania's faerie love; a reveal presaged by rearranging some of Oberon and Titania's lines.

Hiran Abeysekera as Puck is pretty good too.

So, yes; Davies does gay the thing up (also throwing in a little extra mix up with the flowers,) but it's no bad thing. It's there in the text that love is a mercurial thing after all, and that the only bad love is unrequited love (Lysander is a lover without paternal approval, which was a pretty solid no-no at the time of writing.)

Is it flawless? No. Honestly, Oberon shoots at least two more lightning bolts than are truly needed, and the music - heavily inspired by Carl Orff - is a tad overwrought at times. Despite this, it is a beautiful, marvellously energetic reinterpretation of a classic, with a deserved place in the canon of interpretations.

Monsters University and Macbeth

Today was a movie double bill - or in Mummy's case, triple bill, adding Pacific Rim onto the front - for the whole family.

First up was Monsters University, the prequel to Pixar's hugely successful buddy comedy about monsters. The beats of the college buddy movie are pretty well established - the odd couple, the big competition, the rivals, the lessons learned - so the film has to work for some freshness, a lot of which comes from the casting of monstrous protagonists in essentially mundane roles.

We get a twist in our story early on, as we first meet Mike, a small monster whose dream is to be a great scarer, and are then introduced to Sullivan through his eyes. From the original movie, we know Sully as a big, sweet guy with a heart as big as outdoors, but we meet him here as a lazy jock, coasting on natural ability and a family name. In addition, Randy - the dragon of the first film - comes in as a nervous geek and initial friend of Mike, setting up immediate tensions.

What follows is a struggle for our protagonists not only to establish themselves as scarers through the legendary 'Scare Games' and therefore prove themselves to the fierce Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren bringing the awesome), but to forge the enduring friendship that will form the foundation of Monsters Inc. The beats are, as noted, pretty well tried and true, but as with Pacific Rim they feel fresh. In particular, the end of the film holds some actual surprise, and reflects a whole new light back on the action that goes before it.

After dinner, we went on to see Macbeth, a National Theatre Live performance starring and co-directed by Kenneth Branagh. Other notables in the cast included Alex Kingston (and despite playing the protagonist's dangerous, slinky missus, there was not a trace of River Song in the performance), stalwarts John Shrapnel and Jimmy Yuill, and the up-and-coming Alexander Vlahos. Ray Fearon was a new name to me as Macduff, but was one of the standouts in an excellent cast. The performance was in a deconsecrated church and the space was amazing, with the bulk of the performance taking place in an aisle between two sets of stalls, with a more open space at the altar end and a raised platform and three hatches below it in the wall at the door end.

It was not a perfect performance, but it was certainly very good. Notable problems, for me at least:

• The witches were overdone. The basic Wyrd Sisters models are the classic crones and the more modernist muddy hot chicks, and this went with muddy hot chicks with the attendant running around and acrobatics, but delivering their lines in full-on, batshit crazy crone cackles. For my money, they would have been better with the dialogue dialed back a bit. As Hannah noted, it would have made for a more credible source, rather than a trio who, if you met them on a blasted heath, your first instinct would be to avoid eye contact with them.
• Both Kingston and Branagh hammed it up something raucous for their final descents into madness, and again I think this would have been better played down.
• Camera angles and close-ups are not the friend of stage fight choreography. I suspect being in the front row would have been terrifying.

But that being said, the things I liked:

• The witches appeared throughout the play as spectres of doom and their own prophecy, which was done very well.
• In the earlier part of the play, Kingston and Branagh played the Macbeths as a couple very well, with a lot of affection on top of the obvious scheming, and overall their performances were both top-notch. If anything, they seemed weaker on their own than when able to bounce their performances off each other or the other actors, with both showing the most significant weaknesses in their soliloquies.
• Macduff's meltdown on hearing of his family's demise was fantastic, and the leads could have taken a note or two from Ray Fearon.
• The design was amazing.
• In general the production was done with great skill and acted brilliantly.

Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)

Sometimes, I really hate Joss Whedon. Given a tidy sum to direct the Avengers and a contractual week off between shooting and editing, what does he do with his life? He retreats to his utterly gorgeous house with his 'rep company' of actors and makes a low-budget version of Much Ado About Nothing. You know; for funsies.

This being the case, you could almost want him to fail, but you know what? He doesn't. Instead he produces an interesting take on one of the world's favourite Shakespeare plays, albeit one that is not without its problems. It's basically a light rom-com that goes pitch black in the middle and then at the end everyone acts as if it didn't. It also has a strangely undefined villain, whose self-professed motivation is basically that no-one likes him so he doesn't like them and he's going to fuck with them.

In general the playing was good, and if not every note was perfect, it's doing pretty well for a week's work. It's nice to see Clark Gregg working his range a little - especially when Leonato wishes Hero dead, which is a tough act to play and a harder one to come back from - and no-one felt overly stagey. Alexis Denisof was never quite light enough as Bendick, but I'm comparing him to the Branagh film version and David Tennant on stage, so I am holding to a high standard. Nathan Fillion could easily have overcooked Dogberry, but played it nicely close.

Did I mention I got to see Tennant play this on stage? I did. I still want Whedon's house.

As with any even vaguely successful Shakespeare adaptation, there are a lot of interesting choices. To pick up on a few that I noticed: Wordless flashbacks to cement the nature of Beatrice and Benedick's past, somewhat reminiscent of Branagh's similar device with Hamlet and Ophelia; Beatrice and Benedick's opening volleys, taking a cue from Beatrice's line 'I wonder that you be still talking, Signor, nobody marks you' is actually offset from the action, rather than being watched by the other characters as if it were a spectator event; Claudio's 'I'll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope' being maintained as an 'in universe' faux pas.

In terms of adaptation, the use of a modern setting with political motivations and an ever-present photographer capturing every public moment allows the story to maintain the importance of public honour and in particular public shame, although the middle eight, as it were, is still kind of jarring. Dogberry and the watch worked well as cops, and the replacement of a sword with a pistol when Benedick calls Claudio out adds a chilling fatality to the challenge. It is much harder to doubt that he means business when he's strapping on a gat for the purpose, rather than just carrying a sword as a matter of dress.