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Tim Robbins brings original Shakespeare
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TIM Robbins, the Oscar-winning actor, brought a production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and now the play is being presented in Shanghai until June 21.
The Actors’ Gang’s production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Robbins, invites audiences to step into a surreal world of fairies, spells, incantations and lovers bewitched by magic. The world in disorder is restored by the mischief of the night.
“What we have all come to understand about Shakespeare is that he is universal,” said Robbins. “His stories, his tales of humanity transfer cross cultural lines, cross borders and tell universal stories of man and his struggle.”
Even though times have changed since the 1600s, nothing from the play had been altered. The story is still the same as when Shakespeare wrote it, and the language also remains unaltered.
“There’s a thing we discovered in Los Angeles when we did the play: Don’t mess with Shakespeare,” said Robbins. “So we haven’t changed anything. It’s the original story, the original language, and I find that when we stay faithful to it, the story is told. I find when people try to put too much interpretation on it or change it, you tend to lose what Shakespeare was talking about.”
Twelve international actors from The Actors’ Gang illuminate Shakespeare’s forest with dance, original music, kinetic expression and a fervent approach to the reality and magic of the language of the play.
One of the interesting facts about Robbins’ production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is that it is performed without a set, relying on the creativity and physicality of the actors to create the forest and the surrounding background. The actors change costumes on the sides of the stage — a decision that Robbins made to “strip away the artifice of theater.”
“When we originally approached the production, the challenge we presented for ourselves was ‘How do we do this play without any props, without any costumes, without any sets? How do we find the essence of the play through the language’?” said Robbins.
“So we actually didn’t introduce costumes into the production until a week and a half before our first performance last year because what we were finding was that there was so much that was evoked from the language through movement, through music, though people’s voices. The actors in essence were creating the forest without any sets, without any special effects.”
This is the first time that Robbins and The Actors’ Gang have brought a play into the Chinese mainland. The feedback from the Chinese audience has been significantly more positive compared to that in Los Angeles.
“It’s so moving; we’ve been doing talkbacks after every performance with the audiences,” said Adam Jefferis, who is one of the actors. “A large amount of the audience was staying to talk with us afterward and the response is so moving, and the purity of the appreciation is so inspiring for us, it just makes us want to get more and more and come back and do it again.”
According to Jefferis, a lot of people brought children to the shows.
“To hear their laughter, there’s nothing like it,” said Jefferis. “It just builds up joy and hopefully we can immediately turn that back and give the joy right back to the people who come to the shows.”
Even though the play has subtitles displayed on large screens on the sides of the stage, the audience was not even looking at them.
“We have subtitles at the show, which allow the audience to read the text as we’re performing,” said Jefferis. “But when we look out at the audience, we see people leaning forward totally engaged, and sometimes we don’t even get that in Los Angeles.”
But not everything that glitters is gold. A few years ago, The Actors’ Gang experienced a downturn due to the declining economy in the United States, and because The Actors’ Gang is a non-profit organization, donations had decreased. It was when Simon Hanna became the managing director that The Actors’ Gang began thriving again.
“It’s very common for theaters to be non-profit and rely on support beyond ticket sales,” said Hanna. “Many people make a contribution every year generally to keep the theater in their community thriving and growing. People give us US$10 a year to US$100,000 a year. It’s a really important part of our community because we become an organization that is managed not just by the staff, but by the whole group of people.”
The Actors’ Gang has delivers 120 to 150 performances per year, with three to six different productions. Its style of theater is based on a rigorous training process that all company members go through that is based on the work of Ariane Mnouchkine, a French stage director and founder of the Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble Théâtre du Soleil; the commedia dell’arte, a form of theater characterized by the usage of masks; and Anne Bogart, a prolific and award-winning American theater and opera director.
“So you mix all three of those in with a little rock ‘n’ roll and a little Warner Brother’s cartoon, and you got The Actors’ Gang,” said Robbins.
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