set, film and costume design

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
music by Benjamin Britten
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow
26, 28, 30 June, 2 July 2004

team

director: Cathie Boyd
set, film and costume designer: Pippa Nissen
lighting designers: Colin Bell and Cathie Boyd
design assistant: Zoë Radford
musical director: Tim Dean
choreographer: Kally Lloyd-Jones

description

There are three suspended screens across the stage; two are back projected onto plastic forming the background to the action and the larger screen is gauze at the front of the stage. Light boxes - both in the sky and on the ground - change colour throughout the piece as banks of landscape and the edges of architecture.

The electronic elements of the set and sound depict the magic within the libretto. For example when Bottom’s head get’s changed by Puck to an ass, it is shown on the monitor; and Puck at times only appears on the monitor and his voice is amplified to another place in the theatre.
Colour goes through both the costumes, light-boxes and film. This mirrors both the emotions of the music and follows who is on stage; the mechanicals (brighter colours), the lovers (red), or the fairies (green).

The speed of the film is very slow on the 3 screens, and then moments of action are played on the monitors. Generally the slow film changes from evening, to dawn. The textures and colours of a magical forest dominate the film, and then the sparse lines of a building, formed in light form the last scenes in the palace.

press

The Herald (Glasgow) Monday 28th June 2004, Conrad Wilson

When a Midsummer Dream Becomes a Vision to Behold ****
‘Given the number of good productions it receives, Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ must be one of the least destructible operas in the repertoire. Nobody gets it completely wrong, and the RSAMD in this ingenious student presentation gets it largely right.

Staging it in modern dress, it’s true, could rob it of its magic, but in fact increases the frissons that lie in a score composed, we should remember, soon after ‘The Turn of the Screw’. Amplifying Puck’s voice does seem a mistake, however, deliberately sacrificing vocal focus for the sake of a supposedly supernatural effect.

But the link with the ‘Turn of the Screw’ is certainly pertinent. It’s all there in Oberon’s music, and the decision to transform Britten’s counter-tenor portrait of the fairy king into a pallid spectral Peter Quint underlines the point. In the person of Glasgow - born Reno Trolius, an emaciated figure in gloves and a buttoned-in-jacket, it even goes further than that. This glittering-eyed Oberon could have walked straight out of the world of ‘the Cabinet of Dr Caligari’.
Dream, in Cathie Boyd’s brilliant production and Pippa Nissen’s photographic designs, is always on the brink of nightmare. Marc Labonnette’s portrayal of Bottom as a tense Wozzeck-like figure is in this context exactly right, and Britten’s suppressed interest in German expressionism is consistently underlined by Timothy Dean’s attentively detailed conducting.
The lovers, the mechanicals, the octet of fairies (“by kind permission of the headmaster, St Aloysius’ College”) are a model of what ensemble opera should be like, with Catriona Holt as a Tytania all the better for her sexual stealth. Further performances tonight, Wednesday and Friday.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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