‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ at the Stratford Festival is an uneven revival until a fifth-act revelation

Arriving at the end of Shakespeare’s magical comedy — about a quartet of young lovers who gallivant off to the forest after they find themselves in a messy romantic predicament — this extraneous final act is almost always a slog. So much so that by the end of it, I typically feel like the Duke of Athens himself: antsy, exhausted and ready to hightail it out of the theatre. 

That, however, couldn’t be further from the truth for director Graham Abbey’s new revival of “Dream,” which opened Wednesday at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre. In this staging, the fifth act is a riotous farce of the highest order, with actors Michael Spencer-Davis, Sarah Dodd, Aaron Krohn, Sara-Jeanne Hosie, Steven Hao and Michael Man earning some of the biggest laughs of the evening with their appropriately over-the-top, so-bad-that-it’s-good slapstick humour. 

So delightful is this play-within-a-play sequence that when Spencer-Davis’ Nick Bottom asks Theseus (Evan Buliung), the Duke of Athens, whether he’d like to see the epilogue, one audience member seated behind me on opening night piped in with a “Yeah!” even before Buliung could deliver his line.

Alas, Buliung had to stick to the script, slamming the door on the possibility of us seeing that epilogue. But I’m wholeheartedly in agreement with the man in Row E on this one: I could watch anything this sextet is willing to perform. 

The unfortunate catch is that it takes four long acts before Quince’s Mechanicals get their moment in the spotlight, and what precedes it is a surprisingly uneven, overdirected production where striking visuals come at the expense of the central performances. 

At the centre of “Dream” is its four young lovers: Hermia (Vivien Endicott-Douglas) is smitten with Lysander (Jordin Hall), despite the protestations of her father, Egeus (Tim Campbell), who insists that his daughter marry Demetrius (Thomas Duplessie). 

When Egeus threatens to invoke Athenian law and have Hermia executed if she refuses to wed his chosen suitor, the forbidden lovers flee to the forests pursued by Demetrius, who himself is chased down by Hermia’s best friend Helena (Jessica B. Hill), whose love for Demetrius has gone unrequited. 

Abbey, who’s doing double duty as both a director and actor in this Stratford season, has set his production in the Victorian era (with costumes by Joshua Quinlan), in a world of strict, unforgiving moral codes. Here, the stakes for the young lovers couldn’t be higher. But that’s rarely apparent in Endicott-Douglas and Hall’s performances. 

Endicott-Douglas, an extraordinarily talented actor from the Toronto theatre scene now making her Stratford debut, has limited experience doing Shakespeare and in this production, it unfortunately shows. She plays Hermia as if the worst punishment she could receive is a timeout. Much of the humour and colour in Shakespeare’s speeches is often lost in her strained, shouty delivery. And there’s little chemistry between her Hermia and Hall’s Lysander. 

Hill and Duplessie fare better. She’s particularly strong as Helena (arguably the most difficult of the four central roles), charting the character’s journey from being scorned to being pursued with ease and clarity. 

But even still, the development of these four characters and their relationships with each other feels more like an afterthought in this revival. 

That’s especially the case here because Abbey has shifted the play’s focus, perhaps too significantly, in favour of the woodland fairies. He’s added a prologue meant to further explain the rift between the fairy king Oberon (André Sills) and his queen, Titania (Sara Topham). 

But this prologue, while visually stunning (Abbey makes great use of the Tom Patterson Theatre’s trapped floor and multiple aisles), adds little to the proceedings, mostly because the actors never build upon it later in the show. 

Though Topham is wondrous, her breathy line readings lending an ethereal quality to her Titania, arms gracefully floating in the air as if she were in flight, Sills, usually one of the company’s most dependable Shakespearean actors, with a deep, booming voice, seemed to struggle on opening night, stumbling over several lines. And similar to the younger couples, the high stakes of Oberon and Titania’s disintegrating relationship aren’t always clear. 

As the roguish Puck — whose meddling further complicates the young lovers’ situation, transforms Nick Bottom into an ass and makes Titania fall for him — Mike Nadajewski seems to have a blast on stage in an incredibly physical performance that sees him often breaking the fourth wall to interact with the audience. But even he feels overdirected, saddled with a few too many physical gags that detract from the comedy already embedded in the text. 

What this production offers, at least, is much to admire visually and sonically. Lorenzo Savoini’s set features an illuminated orb hung from the rafters, at times transforming into a full moon. The stage floor is often illuminated with various projections of lush, forest imagery. As well, the woodland scenes are accompanied by jaunty Celtic music, performed by members of the ensemble themselves. (Who knew Stratford leading lady Laura Condlln was also such a talented violist? Or that Man was also an accomplished concert pianist?) 

But these esthetic flourishes can’t make up for production lacking strong central performances. And with this “Dream,” I think it says a lot that the play-within-the-play is better than the play itself, which passes, fleetingly, like a hazy, unmemorable fantasy.