Stratford Unveils A Provocative New Take On Shakespeare’s Dream Play as Chamber Theatre.

Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Chamber Play. Photo: Michael Cooper. 

STRATFORD — Forty years ago, a movie called Earthquake arrived in cinemas, its impact heightened by a new system called Sensurround. The aim was to give audience members a truly shuddering experience — not just earth tremors but as close to the equivalent of a full-fledged quake as possible. So if you were an audience member, you felt as though both you and the auditorium were in danger of being shaken to bits.

Indeed, the legendary Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard started losing pieces of ceiling plaster when Earthquake opened there. And in Chicago, alarmed city authorities imposed severe restrictions on the use of Sensurround in its movie houses.

The ghost of this long-abandoned gimmick has returned to Stratford’s Masonic Concert Hall where avant garde American director Peter Sellars has provided a thunderous opening to his “chamber” version of Shakespeare”s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We’re getting total theatre here, but there’s nothing orthodox about the focus and texture of this wildest of Stratford Festival productions. Tareke Ortiz’s grinding soundscape is an immediate assault both on your eardrums and your physical system, so much so that you may worry that your cartilage, along with other aspects of your anatomy, is in danger of being rearranged under the production’s aural onslaught.

But in the midst of this cacophony, your attention is still drawn to the four characters occupying the stage, a bare confining cell area that lighting technician James F. Ingalls, another member of Sellars’s imported design team, ensures will keep redefining itself with its shifting and swirling visual textures in the course of the play’s 105-minute running time. These four actors — Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindstrom and Mike Nadajewski — seem trapped, as indeed they should be, given that they’re imprisoned in a dream. Well, aren’t they?

No bits of plaster fall on us during the performance, although designer Abigail DeVille has turned the ceiling of the hall into an elevated scrap heap — upended chairs, abandoned doors, rusting bedsprings, sagging cushions, wayward bits of wood, even an ironing board, all marooned on a tinfoil background, all suggesting a dismembered and discarded past.

So is Sellars telling us to discard everything that we think we know about Shakespeare’s most magical and mysterious play? In a sense, yes. But we need to be careful here. Sellars is less an iconoclast and theatrical anarchist than an explorer.

He has often been accused of gimmickry. That’s understandable: this is a director who has done Antony And Cleopatra in a swimming pool and Handel’s elegant Orlando in outer space. But Sellars routinely asks audiences to throw away pre-existing guideposts, to join him in a leap of faith, to follow him down strange and often tangled paths. He wants no more than to be judged within the context of his own artistic vision.

Still, one remains doubtful that the humble groundlings attending performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream four centuries ago were pondering Shakespeare’s moral cosmology, or Buddhism’s Six Classes of Human Beings, or any of the other philosophical matters that occupy Sellars in the program notes he has penned for this eerily commanding production. Sellars is certainly nurtured by them, no matter how far-fetched and pretentious they may seem. But the bottom line remains: we simply need to entrust ourselves to his vision.

If you strip away the magic and wonder of Shakespeare’s play and approach its beating heart, you find troubled, tangled relationships. You find pain and darkness and, most frightening, an irrational, destructive, all-consuming anger. That’s what’s happening in this Dream. Most of the familiar comforting plot threads are gone, and when they do surface — as they do momentarily with the worthies preparing to perform the “tragedie” of Pyramus and Thisbe, they’re unsettling. When Trish Lindstrom, briefly taking on the character of Snug, demonstrates how she can roar like a lion, there’s nothing funny here; she’s suddenly terrifying, and once more our preconceived notions about Dream have been shredded.

It’s a shifting kaleidoscope with each of the four actors — virtuosos all of them — shimmering through a multiplicity of characters. And take note: these are more reflections than portrayals because this treatment of Dream is less a play than a tone poem that seethes with violent imagery. With Dion Johnstone and Sarah Afful, it’s Theseus and Hippolyta, Demetrius and Helena, the mischief-making Puck, and Bottom the Weaver. With Mike Nadajewski and Trish Lindstrom, the swath cuts through fairy rulers Oberon and Titania as well as misplaced lovers from the real world and some of the worthies from the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude.

We get less of a plot and more of a torrent of emotions, tinged repeatedly with violence, of stark surrealistic visuals that often seem propelled by uncontrollable rage. Sarah Afful, an actress of immense power, turns Puck into a malignant, screaming force. Mike Nadajewski, tearing himself apart with conflicting emotions, is compelling. Trish Lindstrom, an actress often misused at Stratford, faces a huge dynamic range in her assignment and comes through superbly. And that fine actor Dion Johnstone, a morass of contradictions, is perhaps the strongest embodiment of the lacerating journey that everyone is going through, and he delivers the goods brilliantly.

Sellars has called A Midsummer Night’s Dream the most violent play Shakespeare ever wrote. Here, he has performed open-heart surgery on it, stripping away the familiar comedy and the schtick, the disarming trickery and the magic. He wants to lay bare the true emotional brutality underlying Dream’s vision of personal relationships and, more specifically, of love.

Repeatedly, his textual choices accentuate images of darkness and violence. We hear of “raging rocks,” of “snared souls” of “dank and dirty ground.” In this production, the administration of a magical potion to the eye of a sleeper isn’t an act of mischief — it drips poisonous malice. And even though there’s the promise of serenity and reconciliation at the end, the sense of cosmic chaos lingers. The participants seem drained rather than changed and purified.

But are we really getting characters here? Or are we getting brilliantly executed dramatic abstractions? We can certainly be drawn into Peter Sellars’s compelling mindscape — unless, of course, our traditionalism encourages us to resist him — but we should be honest about what what’s happening here. This is a distillation of Shakespeare’s play — a highly personal distillation that is then filtered through the prism of one of the most original theatre practitioners on the scene today.

Confining four people to a single room conjures up images of Sartre’s No Exit and its hellish vision of limbo. But the “sound” of the play makes its own statement. How linear is this assemblage of dialogue really? This is theatre for lovers of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot or Glenn Gould’s fragmented radio documentary, Idea of North. Close your eyes for a few moments, and you have a greater awareness of how important the rhythms and the cadences, the key changes and tonal modulations and jolting dynamic shifts, are to the evening’s cumulative impact. Sellars himself has compared this piece to a string quartet. And yes, you can see what he means. There are tinges here of the late Beethoven quartets, so mysterious and elusive in texture, and perhaps stronger echoes of the complex emotions of the Bartok quartets.

This is seductive theatre for serious playgoers willing to be seduced into its director’s highly personal world. In terms of quality, it’s infinitely more rewarding than the embarrassingly sophomoric production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream occupying Stratford’s flagship Festival Theatre this summer. Nevertheless, potential ticket buyers for the Sellars Dream need to know in advance what’s in store for them, and it’s incumbent on the festival to warn them.

Any responsible performing arts organization must take risks., and in the past Stratford has often been reluctant to do so. But not this season. This Dream is definitely a candidate for the memory books.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play continues to Sept. 20. Ticket information at 1 800 567 1600 or stratfordfestival.ca)