New Shakespeare season is ‘altogether magnificent’
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By Sophia Lomax
For a theatre director to admit that the first time he put on a particular play, he did it in “a fog of panic and fatigue”, takes guts.
But Andrew Hilton’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped put Bristol’s renowned Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory theatre company (SATTF) at the absolute forefront of innovative classical theatre ten years ago. And now he is preparing to show the work again: new cast, new direction; new century altogether.
Chris Donnelly and Amy Rockson as Bottom and Titania (Picture: Toby Farrow)
In what is SATTF’s first-ever repeat of a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to be shown alongside The Tempest as part of its 2010 season, which starts next month.
In a talk to introduce the season, Andrew and designer Harriet de Winton sketched the direction they aim to lead this year’s plays and talked about where some of their ideas spring from.
Said Andrew: “Both plays are about crucial moments in people’s lives. Although not written close to one another, they are almost exactly the same length and we hope to make some links between them.”
He praised the works as “near perfect”. But bravely – given the feelings of ownership the theatregoing world seems to feel about one of our greatest playwrights – he revealed that the odd phrase has been altered in deference to modern ears.
“Some words and lines have been ‘tweaked’ because there’s absolutely no point whatsoever in being incomprehensible,” he said. “It’s dead air, even with a short moment of using a word that nobody understands or, even worse, which has entirely changed it’s meaning.”
SATTF has even slotted entirely created scenes into previous productions — notably for The Taming of the Shrew in 2008, which had a new ending that some critics claimed was a ‘lost’ epilogue from an old folio…the bluffers…
Lyrical, endlessly quotable and deeply embedded in a collective English psyche, Shakespeare really is all things to all men and women. So it’s something of a magical conjuring feat that Hilton, always assisted by a quietly stellar cast, consistently gives audiences interpretations of works that are so dazzlingly clear you might as well be in a diamond factory.
Bristol24-7 caught up with one of SATTF’s leading actors, Chris Donnelly, this season playing Bottom – who famously spends most of his time adorned with ass’s ears — and Stephano in The Tempest.
Chris, who has performed in the vast majority of SATFF’s productions and played Puck in the first Midsummer Night’s Dream said he was thrilled to be tackling such a “magical” play a decade after first encountering it.
“It’s everything: exciting, a huge challenge and altogether magnificent,” he said. “It’s also beautifully structured for a team of actors, where every group of characters is given equal weight. That’s a really great thing for ensemble playing.”
Chris said it was “bizarre” inhabiting the shoes of a different character from the first time he was in the play. “I keep having flashbacks to when I was on stage doing it. But now I’m fully in my new role and can see that the person playing my old part has different ideas — the whole production is an entirely new piece of theatre, which is thrilling.”
He explained how Andrew’s working methods get right to the heart of the matter, “not just faeries in the forest plus a whole load of comedy.
“It’s a typically ‘Andrew’ approach: first, you investigate the ideas behind people’s actions, also seeing things from different perspectives; and then the glorious comedy comes along — because it is a very funny, magical and wonderful show indeed. And, with this approach, there’s every chance that the collision of different, fully-imagined worlds, that we really do believe in, will mean things get very surreal indeed.”
The company, which launched in 2000, rightly sussed that there was a voracious and unsatisfied appetite among audiences for Shakespeare, using large, professional casts but in an intimate and easily-accessible space. And SATTF’s presence at The Tobacco Factory has proved vital to the renaissance of Southville, as well as fulfilling its mission to bring illuminating productions of classical theatre to Bristol.
Cast members frequently lend their skills to community projects and SATTF has a thriving education programme — despite receiving no public funding.
Key Facts
- Since its inception, SATTF has produced: 18 Shakespeare plays, one Chekhov and a Jacobean tragedy;
- The company places emphasis on giving students from The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School their first walk on the boards;
- In 2001 SATTF won the Empty Space/Peter Brook Award and 2008 invited its first guest director, Sir Jonathan Miller, to take on the mighty Hamlet.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is showing from February 11 to March 21 and The Tempest is showing from March 25 to May 2. To book, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatre.comor phone 0117 902 0344.
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