A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf

2014

Confusions of love: Demetrius is to marry Hermia, but she loves Lysander and is loved by him. The two escape from the city into the forest, followed by Demetrius, who in turn is pursued by Helen, who desires him. Love as a chase.

In the forest, the rulers of the elf kingdom, Titania and Oberon, are in a fierce dispute over a beautiful boy whom both desire passionately. This quarrel is causing great unrest in nature - the laws of time and space are turned upside down this summer night.

In the counter-world to the orderly city, elemental spirits, unrecognized powers, above all the power of Eros and rapture rule. The lovers are impelled by these powers, lusts, desires, in a "midsummer madness" that goes beyond their minds.

Even the fairy queen becomes a victim of her own sexual desire and succumbs in a dream - or is it in reality? - the ecstasy of love with a donkey.

Catalan director Àlex Rigola sees this world of ecstasies, of sex, reflected in a society that was the center of an avant-garde of artists in New York in the early 1960s, the Factory of Andy Warhol.

Dancers, singers, actors, filmmakers and lots of groupies, truth-seeker and love-addicts met here for ecstatic sessions in which they painted pictures, made films, invented and played songs, conceived and performed performances. A walk on the wild side.

Shakespeare's comedy shows how invigorating and destructive these dream worlds - created by drugs and passions - can be, how exuberant, amused and desperate people are in their search for fulfilment, pleasure and excitement. And the story of the Factory.

Direction                Alex Rigola
Stage design               Max Glaenzel
Costumes           Regina Rösing
Music
Dramaturgy Eva-Maria Voigtländer  
Dramaturgical assistance   Eleonora Herder  
Theseus – Artus-Maria Matthiessen
Lysander – Andreas Helgi Schmid
Demetrius – Heisam Abbas
Peter Squenz (Quince) – Daniel Fries
Schnock (Snug) – Lutz Wessel
Note (Bottom) – Urs Peter Halter
Flaut (Flute) – Marcus Calvin
Snout – Katharina Lütten
Hermia – Sarah Hostettler
Hermia (for Sarah Hostettler on november 13) - Hanna Werth
Helena – Pia Händler
Oberon – Sven Walser
Titania – Edgar Eckert
Puck – Moritz Führmann
Elf – Klara Deutschmann

All of this is wonderfully acted, very funny, coherent and opulently staged, the light-hearted translation by Angela Schanelec, which varies between cheerful verses and weighty sentences, is easy for the actors to deliver: a clean, beautiful piece of work that brings the Düsseldorfers, who have recently been so reluctant to attend the theatre, to a standing ovation.

www.nachtkritik.de, 20.09.2014

Catalan director Álex Rigola relocates the fairy king Oberon's mystical forest of confusion to Andy Warhol's Factory. Once in Warhol's world, the two young Athenians Hermia and Demetrius are filmed in their despair over love, and their friend Lysander succumbs to Oberon's love potion in the museum, which seduces him into zombie-like distortions. […] And for two hours without an interval, the balance of power is completely clear: the king of the forest commands and directs, benevolently but not mercifully. And since everyone is filmed and photographed in every embarrassing pose, amidst all the power games and beneath the Factory's surface, a horror abyss opens up in the kaleidoscope of art, the market, and the media, for which, with their masochistic and sadistic mechanisms, a fall from grace is only temporarily valid.

Deutschlandradio Kultur, September 20, 2014 (Listen to the full report: http://goo.gl/qELIIm)

The production thrives on the shifting action on a revolving stage (Max Glaenzel) in the style of the Factory, with its many rooms; it thrives on loud and quiet, Chopin and the Velvet Underground, on great emotions and the intoxication of love. […] At the end, there is a thunderous applause.

Rheinische Post, September 22, 2014

Moritz Führmann, who is already the center of the play as Puck, shines brilliantly as an actor. He also cuts a more than fine figure as a dancer (alongside and with the real elf Klara Deutschmann). Andreas Helgi Schmid, Sarah Hostettler, Pia Händler, and Heisam Abbas, as the musical pairs, are at times a bit over-the-top, but they ensure hearty laughs and a good atmosphere in the stalls. [...]Long, jubilant applause for both the ensemble and the directing team.

NRZ/WAZ, September 22, 2014

Rigola has cut characters and much of the text, edited passages, and given stronger or different roles, especially that of Puck. Puck reigns supreme in the sinful art booth. He is master of the magic drop that confuses the lovers; and Puck is always there, doing cartwheels, riding naked across the stage on his bicycle, and at some point, like Master Warhol himself, picking up the camera, conjuring new media and recording the events. Moritz Führmann does all this brilliantly.

Rheinische Post, September 22, 2014

Director Alex Rigola and his team have spared no effort to colorfully underpin their thesis: Shakespeare's anarchic fairy forest, the one in which the bourgeois laws of love are suspended in favor of intoxication, interchangeable sex, and non-stop partying, is best portrayed in the anarchic drug world of the art commune—even if this itself represents a historical artifact of the 1960s. […] In one of the evening's most powerful scenes, Zettel, alias Warhol disciple John Giorno, transforms into a donkey during the first garish performance rehearsals. Urs Peter Halter recreates Zettel's transformation as a paranoid drug-induced intoxication—with all the abysses of loneliness that might open up when one suddenly finds oneself engaged in absurd sex games in the back room of a studio.

Deutschlandfunk, September 21, 2014