Alan Knight (Bottom)

“We meet a fair few people who look worried and sidle away when you mention that your next play is a Shakespeare, as if you’d offered them a dose of castor oil.” says Alan Knight, co director of Rogues & Vagabonds Wandering Players.

But he feels that these people will find a lot to identify with in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the second Summer Shakespeare production from Waiheke’s travelling theatre company.

It’s not only because it’s one of the most frequently performed and popular of Shakespeare’s plays.

“It has an entire subplot to do with the delights – and horrors – of am dram” says Knight.

 “You’ve got this wonderfully funny story of Bottom and his friends, five ordinary blue-collar people, who take it into their heads to perform a serious drama.”

“They don’t really understand all this fancy poetic language, but they’re determined to give it a go.”

The company feel that too many people forget that Shakespeare in his own time was a writer with a huge popular following, and not just among the elite and educated.

“And he certainly wasn’t above self parody.”

In fact the play that the actors perform is a tale of young lovers, kept apart by their families, who die tragically due to a mistaken suicide pact. The resemblance it bears to another of Shakespeare’s great plays is not a coincidence.

“According to most sources Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet about the same time as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Except in this play he decides to give the tragedy a pantomime-style treatment, with bad props, bad makeup, appalling overacting, and a dog”.

Add to that four angstful teenage lovers, the domestic problems of the King and Queen of the Fairies, and a regrettable incident involving a donkey’s head, and the result is a fiasco.

This is the second Rogues & Vagabonds Summer Shakespeare, following the success of last summer’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Opening at Anniversary Weekend 2007, it will be performed in a variety of local venues, and will include some open air performances.

Rogues & Vagabonds has added a new venue to the tour this year, with the second weekend of the production being hosted by Onetangi Road Vineyard.

The full length play will also run parallel with Athens Survivor Idol, an adapted version of the play remixed as a reality TV show with additional material by Rogues & Vagabonds.

“We’re doing it especially for those who have the castor-oil approach to Shakespeare. it involves a bad wig, plenty of scenery chewing and some gratuitious musical numbers.”

And a dog?

“Of course a dog.”

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