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Hampton Court Theatre Standing ovationsJohn Thaxter IN THE twenty years since Peter Brook's disturbing Stratford version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no English audience has seen a more enthralling production of Shakespeare's most familiar comedy than the extraordinary Soviet one last week unfolding on the stage of Hampton Court Theatre. Standing ovations and arm-aching applause were the only possible responses to a world of theatrical magic created by a brilliant young company. Once word got around they played to packed houses every night; if you missed it» you missed a real treat. In exchange for Youth Action's production of Blood Brothers, taken to Kiev last August, the Ukrainians sent us their professional Theatre on the Podol company’s staging of a translation by Boris Pasternak, This is a production that all London should see (LIFT organizers please note), and with all due respect to YAT and Eric Yardley, we got the best of the bargain. There were no language barriers: the story, familiar to every school-leaver, was performed with such delightful invention and mimetic precision that words were seldom necessary, and our guest actors essayed lines in English for the comedy scenes. Like Brook, artistic director Vitally Malakhov eschews romanticism, placing his 12 actors in a gymnasium quadrangle hung with ropes; but his is a darker enclosure, a landscape of love shadowed by lust, jealousy and revenge. For the opening scene, rigid court conventions encase the three stunningly beautiful actresses in stainless steel corsage and touch-me-not hooped skirts. But suddenly, to the liberating strains of Take Five, the scene flies away to an echoing Athenian forest of swamps where a swarthy Robin Goodfellow complete with Pan pipes enjoys extra-curricular privileges with a balletic Titania. Squabbling lovers, confused by Oberon's spells, settle their differences with spiteful venom (at Saturday's evening performance tall, blonde Helena re-appeared with an elbow bandage after the furious fight) or pursue their sexual inclinations with the fervour of rapists, waving priapic red roses. Pasternak has cut the fairy attendants, and in his version Titania falls in love with a four-legged centaur - the hee-hawing Bottom., plus Snout as the back half of a pantomime donkey. Comic routines and dumb shows are brilliantly staged, with Peter Quince played by Podol star Igor Krirkunov, affectionately caricaturing the company's own dynamic director. A valuable change is to move the Mechanicals' burgomask (a spirited Kiev hoe-down) to bridge the interval, allowing the 'tedious brief scene of Pyramus and Thisbe, to end the performance on a note of mirthless, suicidal tragedy, with Titania/Hyppolita keening over Bottom's lifeless corpse, The Podol set was recreated at Hampton Court by TTC's Jean Goodwin, with lighting by Chris Davies: Podol's young stage manager Dmitri Filin pronounced herself delighted with the theatre's marvelous box of technical tricks.
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