The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
When Titania spoke these words last night, describing the havoc wreaked by her discord with Oberon, it might have been global warming she was describing. I was thinking how incongruous it was to be seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream in the chill of an early autumn evening in the Melbourne Botanical Garden, something like midway between the midsummers of the two hemispheres between which I find myself bouncing this year.
But then I forgot all about it and had a grand time - the first time, I must confess, that I have actually enjoyed this play. Perhaps you need to see it in a park with night falling just as you enter act II. The flying foxes circling overhead - big owl-sized bats - added to the magic of it. The Australian Shakespeare Company was brilliant, too. Leavening it with smart contemporary references and fantastic comic timing (oh Pyramus and Thisbe...!!!), they let the play's poetry and the genius of its structure shine forth. The apparently imprecise overlapping of worlds produces an ending pleasing for its challenge - would you have fairies have power over men's destinies or no? in neither case would you have this happy outcome.
It's a nice thing, isn't it, to finally understand what all the fuss is about concerning something you've not before had eye to hear or ear to see, hand to taste, tongue to conceive nor heart to report.
