There will be love and magic in the air when Sydney’s longest-standing community theatre company presents a fresh take on Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedy.
The Guild Theatre – founded in 1952 and based in its intimate Rockdale venue for more than 50 years – offers a troupe of talented Elizabethan players in an exuberant celebration of love and laughter for a four-week season of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Deep in a woodland clearing, the audience will enter a mysterious fairyland and a time of myth and legend where anything is possible and nothing is it what it seems.
It has been almost 40 years since The Guild presented a full production of a Shakespeare play and director Susan Stapleton of Bundeena knows it was well overdue. Her own dream of staging the magical Shakespearean classic goes back to her years of studying The Bard at university, including a course at Cambridge in England.
“He can be very cheeky and bawdy yet, as a poet, frames his ideas in such beautiful imagery that you can’t help but see into the human soul,” she said.
“The fact that this insight is over 400-years-old yet both timeless and universal makes it all the more intriguing. I’m so very excited and can’t wait to share it with our audiences.”
The Dream is Shakespeare’s funniest and most accessible play and will delight both devotees of The Bard and audience members less familiar with his works.
The cast are a combination of young and more senior members of the Guild Theatre, full of energy to capture the playful wit and fantasy of the play.
Among them are a handful of locals, including Kogarah’s Haki Pepo Olu Crisden making his Guild Theatre debut in the twin roles of Theseus and Oberon.
Miranda’s Terry Neenan, who has trodden the boards backstage and onstage for four decades, will play Snout. Fellow Guild Theatre veterans, Kathy Goddard from Caringbah and Catherine Waters of Rockdale, will play Starveling and Peter Quince respectively.
Kogarah’s Calib James will also make his Guild Theatre debut as Flute, with Mortdale’s Brendan Dallow to play Snug and Egeus.
Rousing medieval music, mysterious, atmospheric sets and elaborate costumes make the show a must see.
The season starts on May 18.
