A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Madách Nemzetközi Színházi Találkozó

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William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 16

Performed in Hungarian with English subtitles

National Theatre, Budapest, Hungary

Director: David Doiashvili

Performed in Hungarian with English subtitles.

3 hours 15 minutes with 1 breaks.

Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most popular dramas, is about the unusual relationship between dream and reality. The play is often performed as if were a light, cheerful fairytale in which comedy mingles with a bit of lewd sexuality. Humans smitten by love and jealous gods wander through a dreamlike forest, but in the end everyone find’s his or her match. According to Georgian director David Doiasvili, this interpretation only touches the surface of the text and fails to capture the deeper significance of the drama.

Blunt humor and gentle joviality play an important role in this production by the Hungarian National Theatre, but this only works when the powerful drama of ever-shifting human sentiment, desire, and disappointment, the darker side of our existence, is also there.

This production examines the strange, mysterious relationship between dream and reality. The characters wander through a complex emotional labyrinth. Everything that they thought they knew about themselves and one another is turned upside down. As is the case in real life, in the play love creates a complete confusion out of their lives. Shakespeare’s characters suddenly realize that they are unable to tell the difference between the dreams created by their desires and the reality in which they are actually living. Indeed, the intense emotions they experience in their dreams seem more real than the reality to which they have become accustomed and which they live as if it were merely a role.

In David Doiashvili’s interpretation, the conflicts and encounters between the characters of Midsummer Night’s Dream are trials, and once the characters have gone through these trials, they can no longer live as they lived before. A captivating kind of initiation takes place before our very eyes, somewhere in the confused borderlands between dream and reality.

Theseus/Oberon

Lajos Ottó Horváth

Hippolyta/Titánia

Auguszta Tóth

Puck/Philostrat

Dénes Farkas

Egéus

László Tóth

Lysander

Tibor Fehér

Demetrius

Bence Mátyássy

Hermia

Kamilla Fátyol m.v.

Kinga Katona

Tamás Olt m.v.

Set designer

David Doiashvili

Costume designer

Róza Bánki

Dramaturgist, assistant director

András Kozma

Stage manager

Gábor Dobos

István Lencsés

Prompter

Anikó Sütő

Assistant director

Zsófia Tüű

Director

David Doiashvili

Main Stage

David Doiashvili

Born in 1971 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, David Doiashvili graduated as a theatre director from the Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film University. He was appointed principal director of the Kote Marjanishvili State Academic Drama Theatre in 1998 and managing director and artistic director of Vaso Abashidze Music and Drama State Theatre in 2007. He has worked for major European theatres, such as the Royal National Theatre in London, the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Zajc in Rijeka and the National Theatre Bucharest. He is two-time recipient of the Duruji Award, the most noted prize for work in the theatre in Georgia, and his stage production of Macbeth, which was performed as part of MITEM in 2014, was chosen as the Best Play at a prestigious international festival in Bogota, Columbia. Currently, two of Doiashvili’s productions are part of the repertoire of the National Theatre in Budapest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cyrano de Bergerac.

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