A Midsummer Night's Dream by Abbey Shakespeare Players at St Dogmael's Abbey (review)

Reviewed by: A Midsummer Night's Dreamby Abbey Shakespeare Players at St Dogmael's Abbey Myfanwy Elizabeth Edwards A Midsummer Night's DreamPresented by the Abbey Shakespeare Players at St Dogmael's Abbey, Llandudoch. 2– 508 2023. Directed by Amy Levene. Music composed and directed by Richard Morris. With Richard Mitchley (Theseus), Jude Williamson (Hippolyta), Giles Dawson (Egeus), Anna Monro (Hermia), Adam Edgerley(Lysander), Amy Levene (Helena), Matthew Bellwood (Demetrius), John Holtorp (Oberon), Nelly Ward (Titania), Richard Carwardine (Puck), Ralph Williamson (Changeling Boy), Simon Beattie (Old Nedar), Tony Shepherd (Lord), Heledd Hart (Nick Bottom), Gabriel Pearcey (Peter Quince), Chris Turner (Francis Flute), Helen Power (Tom Snout), Ian Wood (Snug), Georgina Ferry (Robin Starveling), Ann Schofield (Philostrate), Phoebe Boarman (Peaseblossom), Imogen Boarman (Cobweb), Cosi Pearcey (Moth), Linda Kirk (Mustardseed), Matilda Boarman (Sparkleberry), Gwen Morris (Sparkleblue), Gracie Pearcey (Hazelnut), Elizabeth Bailey (Mistletoe), and Martha Beattie (Bluebell). Crows circled overhead and grey skies threatened rain above a blanket-laden audience sitting in camping chairs—or, like me, on the crumbling stone walls of the 900-year-old Welsh abbey of St Dogmael—awaiting the arrival of Theseus (Richard Mitchley) and Hippolyta (Jude Williamson) to begin Abbey Shakespeare Players' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Behind the audience, at the bottom of the gentle incline of the Teifi Valley, was the mill pond of Y Felin (a working water mill) and the village of Llandudoch, sitting on the estuary of the river Teifi; the stage was backed by a thicket of tall trees and hedgerows from which birds and, occasionally, fairies, emerged. This setting leant an appropriately ethereal and ancient quality to the proceedings, whilst also, for me, emphasizing the natural world within the text. The numinous qualities of the abbey, remaining after all this time overgrown with and encircled by the natural world, seemed to reflect the binary in the play between the grand citadel of Athens and the wilderness of the woods. The performance was the thirty-sixth for the Players in their more organized form, although they first performed at St Dogmael's Abbey in 1973 as a band of Oxford undergraduates who brought their student production to Ceredigion, where one of their number had an aunt with a cottage. This year saw the third generation of the players whose children, grandchildren, friends, and pupils have become involved over the past fifty years. The actors playing the myriad fairies in the production could be traced to their parents through surnames linking them to several other End Page 88performers, as well as musicians. Sadly, one of the Players' founding members, Clive Burgess, passed away just after the production had finished this year. I would like to thank him and his friends for putting on their student production fifty years ago and bringing generations of locals and holidaymakers joy on sometimes rainy, windswept late summer nights. The stage was on two levels formed of the overgrown ruins of the abbey, which the company used to great effect throughout the performance. The ruins were used particularly for entrances in the early scenes, with the lower level signifying the palace of Theseus to which the characters descended. Frequently during scene changes, characters slunk off into the dark hedges at the top of the stage and filtered down to enter. An outcrop of stone on the right was used to elevate Titania's (Nelly Ward) bower, with fairies clustered around the sleeping fairy queen and Bottom (Heledd Hart). The Athenian lovers used stage left and right stone walls as their sleeping places too. The presence of walls and steps (created by way of the stones of collapsed abbey walls) allowed for the lovers to traverse a "forest" that presented arduous terrain and contributed to a sense of confusion. The intergenerational ethos was most visible in the casting of the production, most obviously through the casting of the fairies as an intergenerational group made up of the Boarman, Morris, and Pearcey women and girls. The majority of the fairies were under ten years old; their mothers led them in dancing and helped the gaggle on and off stage several times. Amy Levene cast Richard Carwardine as a more mature Puck, lending him...