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Nicholas Cottis on A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Geoffrey Reeves at the Nortcott Theatre, Exeter is staging a Peter Brook style production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, full of trapezes and gymnastics and tracksuited fairies. It looks good from the cheaper seats, father back and higher up, where you can enjoy the spectacular use of white as a colour and the full width and depth of an enormous stage. But the closer you get to the action, the closer you get to the sweet. There are programme credits for the Royal Marines at Lympstone: did the actors train on their assault course? Their movements are exiting, but the muscular exertion puts a strain on their vocal chords, so that the verse comes over with much vehemence and little subtlety. I was grateful for the contrast of Jacqueline Pearce's poised and well spoken Titania, and admired David Freedman, who puffed with the best of them and found music in lines. There is a sense of mischief verging on violence which adds most of the lovers' subplot. Something about Helena flights from horseplay to hysteria (in a tomboyish interpretation by Carol Frazer) recalls Gloucester in King Lear : "as flies to wanton boys, so we are to the Gods..." Bottom's asshead owing something to the Padstow hobby horse, is extremely creepy, like the visage of the housefly magnified 100,000 times: Garfield Morgan gives him a likeable swagger. A nice touch is Daniel Collings' easy grace as sung the joiner: an old man who might have become a Burbage if only a Shakespeare had passed by and spotted him as a natural actor. Nicholas Cottis. The Guardian Tuesday 14th June 1977
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