A Midsummer Night's Dream

This blog is beginning to look like the arts page in the Cambridge Evening News! We seem to be going to a show every week this summer and three of them have been out-doors.  Each time we've been lucky with the weather and last night's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream kept up our unbroken run.

The show formed part of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival and was held in the private gardens of the Members of Trinity College, which is a lovely, secret place hidden behind thick hedges and iron railings. Although the layout is quite formal, the gardeners have allowed large areas to go un-mown until all the wild-flowers have set seed. As a result, there are some quite large wildflower meadows dominated by knapweeds and field scabious flowers among the trees. Indeed, it's almost an arboretum rather than a garden. I can also vouch for the fact that it has a thriving insect population, including mosquitos and hoards of moths that appeared when the lights came on in the second half, attracting a couple of bats.

The great thing about this play is that its really easy to understand and very slapstick, so it makes a good introduction to Shakespeare for children and students, of which we had a large turn-out at last-night's show. In the summer holidays, the colleges play host to language students from all over the world. Last month, almost everyone in Cambridge seemed to be speaking Spanish, but now it is much more international with a high proportion of Oriental students among Americans, Italians and many more joining the usual eccentric Cambridge audience. Just sitting in the middle of such an interesting picnicking crowd kept us amused for almost an hour before the show started.

The down-side if putting on A Midsummer Night's Dream is that we all did it in school and so it's hard to shake off the amateur, educational baggage that comes with it, especially out-doors with no sound system or stage. Our show had me worried at forts, with actors coming and going then more or less standing and delivering their lines. But soon the slapstick began, Dan began hooting with laughter and couldn't stop. We almost had to take him away, but then the over-seas students realised that this was a comedy and started to laugh too.

We had a really pleasant evening out and Dan enjoyed it more than anyone. The mosquito bites will soon go away but he'll always remember his evening out. We've been watching You Tube performances of the Pyramus and Thisbe "play within a play", which is the bit everyone remembers.