A Review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an excellent, humorous play written by Shakespeare. It is highly characteristic of Shakespeare, bringing several subplots into one masterful story. I have seen this play presented in a classical format and I found it thoroughly entertaining. Directed by Robin McKee, UNL’s March 27th performance of Shakespeare’s comedy was most definitely entertaining, but not because it was well done. I found the drama laughable, though the comedy did not come from Shakespeare’s clever writings. In fact, the presentation of this play seemed to ignore much of the script’s original wit and focused completely on a ludicrous setting. By setting the classical piece in the sixties, the audience’s attention was diverted from the quality of the drama’s phrasing. On top of these atrociti . . .
These added touches do supply ample humor, though I noticed that the viewer who laughed in these instances seemed to identify a little to well. It is not acceptable, however, to compromise the script in doing so. It is acceptable to change the environment of a play in order to give a worn out production a new twist. Also, a large ramp sat mid-stage, providing the clever entrances and levels that kept the script’s complexity under control. Shakespeare can get wordy, but a majority of the actors did a terrible job of hiding their difficulties from the audience. While I enjoyed some of the characters, the strained verse of others became wearing. A christmas light-outlined jungle gym lent well to a sixties version of Mount Olympus. The creativity of the scenes allowed for much of the play’s humor amongst the various story lines. I don’t believe that good acting portrays to the audience, “Help me, please somebody give me the next line!” The set was undeniably the play’s greatest asset. Finally, I felt that the acting in this play was marginal at best. I would not recommend this play to anyone unless I knew they would be drugged up and bored anyway. In addition, many lines were delivered with improper inflection or timing. The idea of presenting this play in a setting more familiar to our generation was clever and introduced several new interpretations. I think that I could have excused the strange setting of this classical piece, the poor acting, or the inconsistency of the theme, but I found the combination of all three inexcusable. I had several problems with this presentation.
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