THEATRE REVIEWS

You have to have vision to create and two people at the West Yorkshire Playhouse showed that they had it when they staged Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The first was the choreographer and director David Nixon and the other was Duncan Hayler who supplied the set and lighting design. Add to this the well tried and tested music of Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms and you have the ingredients for a first rate evening of entertainment for the discerning ballet audience.

The tale is simple, a ballet company in rehearsal in London prior to a railway journey to Edinburgh where they are to perform. Take Shakespear’s story of the goings on on midsummers night and you have a ballet in three acts. Puck, interpretatively danced by Christian Broomhall, becomes the ballet master Robin Puck who has exchanges with the Artistic Director Theseus, danced by Hironao Takahashi. The dancers all have desires on other members of the cast and various intrigues are taking place as the plot evolves. Lysander is danced by Jonathan Olliver, Demetrius by Christopher Hinton-Lewis, Helena by Pippa Moore, Hermia by Keiko Amemori, Theseus by Hironao Takahashi and Hippolyta by Desiré Samaai. The companies carpenter Nick Bottom is danced by guest performer Adam Temple who has a major input into the dream sequence of the middle act.

So how is this brilliant staging brought about? It is dependent on the set design which is superb and drew applause from the audience for being so spectacular. The large stage of the theatre added greatly to impression as magical trains took over. They flew, they rolled and moved giving the impression of being real and yet magical. You will have to go and experience these moments for yourself or be at a disadvantage to those that have.

Of course nothing will have been achieved without the insight and dance skills of the director’s choreography. His conception of the significance of Shakespear’s play and the goings on in the ethereal world of a ballet company is spot on as we see the differences between the characters and their interaction with their surroundings. You can say this is a superb ballet, you can say it is a brilliant ballet, but your description will probably be in excess of these superlatives after you have seen it. The real life ballet company give their all to make this ballet work, as do the orchestra under the baton of John Pryce-Jones.

This shows what can be achieved with ballet if it is staged on a large stage, as an appreciative audience showed with their applause at the final curtain. A must see show. © BA

“A Midsummer Night's Dream” is in Leeds on the 5th to the 13th September, 2003.