DREAM – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM – REVIEW OF 2023 PRODUCTION AT KYVERNEIO COURTYARD IN THESSALONIKI

 Reviewed by James Karas

Dream is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that is now playing in a makeshift theatre in the courtyard of a small palace in Kalamaria in the outskirts of Thessaloniki. The adaptation by Froso Lytra makes serious cuts and changes to Shakespeare’s text, cutting it down to about 75 minutes. Lytra also directs and the result has many virtues but also some issues.

The reduced length cuts out some scenes as one would expect. The play finishes when Oberon and Titania are reconciled, and we hear a few bars from Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.

The most interesting change made by Lytra is her treatment of the artisans. These are the working-class people of Athens who rehearse and put on a show for the marriage celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. Lytra changes the artisans to stagehands working for the National Theatre of Northen Greece (NTNG) with the company’s logo inscribed on their t-shirts. Instead of rehearsing the skit of Pyramus and Thisbe as in Shakespeare, they mimic and parody the performances of previous scenes.

In the opening scene Egeus appears before Theseus objecting to his daughter Hermia’s love for Lysander while he wants her to marry Demetrius. Helena is in love with Demetrius.

The two couples go to the forest outside of Athens for the rest of the play. But the NTNG stagehands, all men except one, parody the scene to good effect. They do the same for several scenes, argue among themselves and one of them, Dimitris, is turned into a donkey with whom Titania falls in love. All well done but we do miss the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, the “play” that they perform at wedding celebrations that usually brings the house down.

The courtyard of the Palataki

Aside from cutting scenes out Lytra syncopates scenes by having two separate scenes in the text played at the same time. This happens in the argument between Hermia and Helena and Demetrius and Lysander. The scenes, the poetry and the acting are beautiful as Shakespeare wrote them and did not gain anything by modification.

The lovers, Eleni Yianoussi as Hermia, Anna Efthimiou as Helena, Nikos Tsoleridis as Demetrius and Yiannis Syrios as Lysander, did excellent work, especially during the lovers’ quarrels.

Grigoris Papadopoulos doubled as Theseus and Oberon and Maria Solomou played both Titania and Hippolyta with regal effect as the Greeks and with silliness as the faeries. Lytra has added a second Puck (Ioanna Demertzidou and Alexandros Zafeiriadis) and I am not sure to what effect. Neither of them is an ethereal figure who flies from one problem to the next. She has also added the boy (Polydoros Lapidakis), the one over which Oberon and Titania fight, a lithe dancer who can do everything that Puck does. Presumably he can dance superbly but cannot act as well.

The "artisans" or stagehands.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has 23 characters and Lytra uses only 14 actors and three dancers and that is quite commendable in an adaptation.

Having said that there are a few issues with the production. The “theatre” is the courtyard of a building called Palataki (little palace) or Kyvernio (government house). It was built in the 1950s for official use and was later given to the Greek royal family who used it for exactly one night. The building is presently abandoned but its courtyard is used for theatrical productions and concerts.

There is a large space in front of the building followed by some steps and another open area below the stairs. There are make-shift seats on three sides of the playing area holding, I guess, several hundred people. There are floodlights at ground level surrounding the playing area and that is the problem for the spectators on the sides. The lights shine in your eyes making it difficult to see the actors, especially when they are playing at the bottom of the steps.

All the actors are miked, and all voices come from speakers on each side of the stage. Frequently the only way you can identify the speaker was by watching whose lips are moving.     

Lytra has a good idea to shorten A Midsummer and to change the artisans. It would be almost impossible to translate their occupations and their actions in their play for their king. But she needs better facilities so we can follow what is happening.

______________________  

Dream, a version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Froso Lytra in a production by the National Theatre of Northern Greece and the naan Theatre Group continues until July 23, 2023 at the Kyverneio (Palataki) courtyard, Kalamaria, Thessaloniki, Greece.  www.ntng.gr/

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press.