
Suzy Cooper’s Titania, centre, and Ian Giles’s Bottom, right, with the Fairy Queen’s fairies in York Stage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Picture: Charlie Kirkpatrick
HOT on the heels of fellow York musical theatre practitioners Black Sheep Theatre Productions staging The Tempest, York Stage branches out into performing Shakespeare.
Producer-director Nik Briggs has selected Bill the Bard’s most performed comedy for his company’s first co-production with the Grand Opera House.
This is very much a reinvention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Out goes the formality of the ancient court of Athens; in comes the modern northern council estate of Athens Court, home to Theseus’s Pad and the Community Payback Centre, peopled with chunky chains, bling galore and shiny shell suits to match the fenced barriers.
As with Black Sheep Theatre’s The Tempest, music plays its part, this time in a combination of incidental music composed by musical director Stephen Hackshaw and performances of Nineties and Noughties’ dancefloor fillers arranged by Hackshaw and keys cohort Sam Johnson.
These are predominantly sung in fabulous style by York Stage fledgling-turned-West End performer May Tether, resplendent in silver suit and boots as she makes flying stage entries reminiscent of Kylie Minogue’s concerts. Welcome back, May, for a star turn at the heart of ensemble numbers such as the opening Freed From Desire and climactic We Found Love.
Mather is but one jewel in Briggs’s Dream casting. Suzy Cooper, for so long a golden staple of dame Berwick Kaler’s York pantomimes, returns to the Grand Opera House to play the dual role of Theseus’s southern prize, haughty Hippolyta, and the sensuous, voracious Fairy Queen Titania, her voice notably deepened and as pucker as Joanna Lumley.
For the finale, her Hippolyta re-emerges with a broadly Yorkshire accent, seemingly blending with those around her on the council estate.
Cooper forms a double act at the double with York-born Royal Shakespeare Company actor, who rules the estate and Hippolyta alike in studded leathers as a muscular, volcanic Theseus.
He then transforms into the king of bling, the Fairy King Oberon in cap, animal-print trimmed coat and taut see-through T-shirt, to play games with Cooper’s Titania in the forest with James Robert Ball’s impish Puck as his meddlesome agent of mayhem.
Holgate and Cooper have fused playful chemistry, mystery and magic from intense but limited rehearsal time, topped off by Elizabeth Real’s woodland costume designs for Cooper’s Titania, Kylie golden hotpants et al.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is full of competitive clashes: Athens Court versus the woodland; Oberon versus Titania; the young lovers versus each other; Puck versus the young lovers; Bottom’s ego versus the rest of the Rude Mechanicals, as they mount the play within the play to the shrill whistle of Jo Theaker’s Petra Quince.
In keeping with his flair for Nineties and Noughties’ signature costume designs, Briggs has cast his young lovers with delightful modernity: Meg Olssen’s exasperated Hermia; Amy Doneneghetti’s no-nonsense Helena; Sam Roberts’s solid northern lad and University of York DramaSoc alumnus Will Parsons, bringing shades of Mick Jagger elasticity to “posh boy” Lysander.
If you could choose one York actor to play Puck/Robin Goodfellow, it would surely be James Robert Ball, a polymath talent who now adds rope work to his skills as a professional musician, published novelist, singing and performance teacher, freelance musical director and pianist.
In gaudy shell suit and perky peaked cap, his diminutive Puck is nimble, mischievous, his voice as flexible as his lithe movement, and he has the ability to drift in and out, sometimes on rope or swing, and then be wrapped around the young lovers as he dispenses Oberon’s love potions.
Titania’s fairies in shimmering silver, have their moments too, while the Rude Mechanicals maximise their badinage, from Theaker’s Quince to Andrew Roberts’s Snout, with his unexpected spherical appendage in the climactic Wall Play. Ian Giles’s Bottom is more avuncular than usual, but still with that I Know Best boastful air that has him making an ass of himself in the company of Cooper’s Titania.
Briggs directs with a flourish, aided by Adam Moore’s superb lighting design, and his set design works a treat: one half metal for the council estate, with a set of steps, fireman’s pole and scaffolding; the other half, bare tree trunks and a wooden seat to denote the forest.
Witty touches include the use of York Stage red tabards to signify the Rude Mechanicals’ status as actors, not least Emily Alderson’s auburn-haired Starveling shaking her head at the colour clash.
If one scene sums up the Shakespeare-meets-Shameless vibe of Briggs’s ‘Dream’, with its rave culture echoes, it is The Seduction Medley in the woodland finale to the first half, where Mather’s Moon is in majestic diva mode singing Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Show Me Love and You Got The Love as Cooper’s Titania seduces Giles’s Bottom and all around her dance in sylvian rapture in silver.
York Stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Grand Opera House, York, until Sunday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday and Sunday matinees. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.