Experiencing director Geoffrey Hyland’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at this year’s Woordfees a few weeks back, was a revelation. Thrilled to hear that the production was coming to Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre, I immediately touched base with the director to find out more about this astonishing not-to-be-missed Shakespeare. DIANE DE BEER reports:
Scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Photographers Llewellyn de Wet and Mark Wessels.
Tankiso Mamabolo as one of the Faerie’s.
It’s difficult to resist nagging everyone to get tickets for this amazing Shakespeare. I almost missed seeing it at the Woordfees, because I thought I might have lost my head booking for a Shakespeare during a very hectic festival schedule.
Fortunately I was persuaded to go and it was one of the best decisions I made at the festival. Chatting to the director about this particular production, I have even more reason to plead with theatre enthusiasts to go.
“This was the first Shakespeare at Maynardville post Covid,” explains Geoffrey and he elaborates. “Having been through some dark times, the organisers and myself thought: WOW! it’s time to celebrate love, life and exuberance with fantasy and dreams in a wonderful colourful and passionate production.
“Are there deeper things, of course there are deeper things, there always are in Shakespeare, but I think one goes along on this wonderful joyride of misadventure and laughs and that celebration of love and the funny things that humans do to pursue love,” he encourages prospective audiences.
It’s time to take some time-out from the world, to remind ourselves about how wonderful life in all its permutation is, notes Geoffrey. That’s why he selected this particular Shakespeare to kick off Maynardville post-covid, to re-energise this space. The wonderful forest setting in the play was a reflection, which meant it was doubly joyous.
He is often asked about his favourite Shakespeare and of course, it is the one he’s working on at that moment. “That’s the one you dive into and you’re investigating and you’re finding new things all the time,” he says.
When he start with any play, his approach is getting to know the play, reading and more reading, imagining, and listening to music that resonates just to get a feeling of what this thing means to him.
“I can’t do it if it doesn’t mean something to me, if it doesn’t light my fuse. I know I’m not going to be able to light the fuse of the actors, or that of the audience, so I have to find my way into a particular production.”
What got him going was watching kids playing with bubbles, and suddenly he thought, this is the play, “these wonderful bubbles flying, joyously, madly, they make no sense whatsoever and yet they lift the spirit.”
He had found his first connection, the lightness of fun, and the absolute beauty of those brief moments of life that are so captivating.
Only then came the company – the actors. The producers gave him a free hand in choosing who he wanted.
“It’s never about individuals. It’s about people you know are going to meld and enjoy each other. I needed people who would be team players rather than individual stars. They’re all stars believe me, but they needed to give and come to the play with an open heart and to come along with me as a director,” he emphasises.
Because they had a very short time to work, he also needed a cast who would be willing to give extra time. They needed to understand instinctively that they had to give everything to the role, he stressed.
What he enjoys about actors, is their ability (with him) to find their character. “I don’t come with a preconceived notion. You are the character and we must find that character in you,” is what he shares with his actors.
“My part as the director is to evoke the performance from what is in front of me and I need people who will continue to give to me and allow me to shape what is already in there as part of them.”
“I’ve never worked with a group of people together who are so much part of each other and giving and taking in equal measure between each other. The important thing for me as a director is to make the actors feel beautiful, then they will give of their best and I think the way we’ve come to do the production, they do.”
He describes the way they want to be on stage, bringing an exuberance and an energy, and because they’re tapping into themselves, into their life force, they are enjoying playing in front of an audience who then plays with them.
But all of that happens in a wonderful discipline of recreating a performance, never overdoing it, but sparking off each other all the time.
They’ve been very lucky, the audiences have responded beautifully and have enjoyed every single performance. And I can attest to that.
With Shakespeare especially, Geoffry thinks this is where teachers play a huge role in young people’s lives. “I was drawn to Shakespeare by a teacher. I think I was in grade five and went to see a production at Maynardville. I was captured for life and I went on reading and being interested. It inspired and unlocked something in me and probably was one of the impulses that made me the creative person that I feel I am today.
“Having had that experience as a young person, it has been one of my goals to inspire the same kind of experiences in other people. It’s a desire I have to make them feel the same things that Shakespeare had made me feel. I don’t think it is only about feeling, but rather unlocking yourself, potential things within yourself and once actors get it, there’s no going back.”
Because the two previous seasons were both performed outdoors, how would Geoffrey counter that missing element at Montecasino, but he seems to have all the answers and as a recent devotee, I’m going to take his word.
“There’s always give and take. With outdoor theatre, because you don’t have so much control on the technicalities, you need to focus completely on the actor in front of you and anything else that comes with that is a bonus.
“It’s a decoration and added depth of flavour, so that magical forest setting of Maynardville is impossible to duplicate.
“However, this production was created for and by Maynardville. We can’t physically duplicate it, but it has inspired the actors and in a sense they have got Maynardville, that beautiful energy, inside their performance. So having strongly focussed on the actors in creating this production, I still believe that they are what is the essential heart of the show.”
There will be small changes, he agrees, but the actors will be there to tell this wonderfully mad story and that is what you focus on when changing a venue. “It’s that live person in front of you that creates the magic.”
That’s exactly what he has achieved with this amazing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the things I thought while watching it for the first time, was that this was the perfect introduction to Shakespeare if you’ve never seen any of his great works.
De Beer Necessities 
Wow, it is such great news that more people get to see this delightful, genius version of a wonderful play. I felt so lucky to see it at Maynardville: https://calloffthesearch.com/art-entertainment/the-dreamiest-of-midsummer-nights/
http://www.CallOffTheSearch.com