Peter Quince Presents: A Midsummer Mechanical's Dream!

The Botanical Gardens is a fabulous outdoor space that the Australian Shakespeare Company have beautifully carved out for their often-vibrant productions. This show takes a detour from their usual work and focuses on the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bad acting, the ridiculous rivalries and the slapstick humour that characterise the four tradesmen are brought to life on a large scale, and their very questionable theatrical talents are all playfully explored in one big production.

In this show Peter Quince the Carpenter (Kevin Hopkins), Snug the Joiner (Madeleine Somers), Nick Bottom the Weaver (Andrew Bongiorno), Francis Flute the Bellows Mender (Anthony Rive), Tom Snout the Tinker (Scott Jackson) and Robin Starveling the Tailor (Hugh Sexton) are the protagonists. Their quest to find the perfect performance for Duke Theseus and his wife Hippolyta at their wedding in Athens is imagined in various proportions and in a variety of fantastic contexts.

In this quest to find an alternative to The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe by Peter Quince the crazy company of actors revisit almost every Shakespeare play. The adaptations they imagine are wildly energetic, witty or simply ingenious and often border on a form of theatrical pillaging; imagine Hamlet played like a Dogma 95 film and with characters dressed as the Taliban or Anthony and Cleopatra playing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. 

There are times when the ideas behind the appropriations are more ingenious than the delivery, but this is in keeping with the nature of this troupe. The show has an incredibly unrelenting pace but it is, undoubtedly, a hilariously astonishing and surprising experiment.

Patricia Di Risio