Didn’t take much literature in school, only the very basic, didn’t go beyond the Merchant of Venice. The Taming Of The Shrew was much like a Prodigy song and the best version of Romeo and Juliet, I feel, was the one with Leonardo and Claire. Give me Superman, Spider-man, Batman, The Lord of the Rings or Men in Black anytime! Hahaha…
When a friend had asked if we’d be interested in an evening under the star with the Singapore Repertory Theater’s rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we thought it to be a good chance to hang out with friends and family who are hardly in the country. We were ill prepared for the grammar was that to follow. We feel whoever wrote Yoda, must have been strangely inspired by Shakespeare! In Yoda we trust!
The stage was a 3 by 3 grid of walkways, the audience sat within this grid, and a huge rotating cube at the back, representing “home”. It started out slow, had to get the hang of the language and the not-so-good audio levels. It doesn’t help when everyone’s spewing Shakespeare across a shake-y speaker system.
This was an open-air stage so the sound could have been quite a challenge for them. I think some guy mentioned at the beginning that this was the first time they had held a play at that venue.
Getting used to the language at this play reminds me of when we saw Trainspotting. In an almost empty movie theater, the only ones who laughed in the initial 15 minutes of the movie was the row of foreigners who must have understood “shite” from the get go! They were the lucky ones!
Ok with the grammar in check, the story started to fall into place. Ode is to marry Hippo, Ode wanted his daughter Her to marry Dem cos Dem loves Her (or she dies or lives her life out in convent) but Her loves Lys, and Her’s sister Hel loves Dem. Are we having fun yet? One night they runaway (separately) into a forest/wood filled with a team of actors and a fight between some fairy King and Queen (also separate incidenced). Now this is getting better!
When this was all making sense a friend mentioned – do you know why Lys is limping and using a cane? Cos he fell in love with Her(n)ia! Hhhmmm…
The parts that did it for me was when Hel was talking about how she and Her grew up together and they threw in “sally-sally-luom-chiam-pas!”. Somewhere in there, (I think was Lys) a couple of lines were delivered in the tune of a famous Phantom tune. Even that song… “At first I was afraid, I was petrified…” was belted out by the Fairy Queen when she was mislead to fall in love with an ass! I love you Dolly!!!
The finale which were the team of actors putting on a play on the wedding day of Ode to Hippo, Her to Lys and Hel to Dem (yes they got it all sorted with help from the fairies, even the fairies worked themselves out – yippee! a happy ending), they had a non-belly-challenged guy in a 5XL red cheogsam, a guy used the traditional Chinese red lion suite (he was a lion, duh!) and another large bellied man in a large white suite which made him look like a long lost Teletubby cousin. White Teletubby was called Moonshine… more apt name then most.
The funny one was the wall… yes a wall, this guy walks up with 2 large sheets of cloth to the front and back of him with 1 hole in each of them – one at the back of him at his butt and one at the front of his at his crotch. Through this “hole” the play’s lovers had their love chats! Quite funny.
Thank you for an enjoyable evening of kooky grammar and strenuous running up and down a large stage (especially by Hel). Kumxia to my friends who’d asked us along and our friend’s friend who helped us buy the tickets.
