Royal Shakespeare Company to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the road with a cast of amateurs

The Royal Shakespeare Company is to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the road for its most ambitious project ever staged next year, with a cast of hundreds from amateur companies around the country.

RSC deputy artistic director Erica Whyman who has been working on the project throughout the year said neither she nor the company had ever tried anything on the scale of Dream 2016.

The production has a core cast of 18 professionals who will perform with 14 amateur companies playing Bottom and the Mechanicals in 12 sites around Britain.

It is particularly fitting as in the play the mechanicals are a group of six amateur actors who hope to stage a play for a big celebration: the wedding party of Theseus and Hippolyta.

A total of 687 people will be involved from the professional cast, musicians, amateurs and school children brought in to play fairies.

The shows will be performed around the country before returning to Stratford for midsummer, when each of the amateur companies will perform at the RSC.

“I’ve always loved touring and care very much about having a proper relationship with regional theatres,” Ms Whyman, who is directing the show, said. “I’ve done a fair bit of participatory work with young people and adults. But no one has ever attempted to bring this all together in a professional production.”

The project, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, has been a logistical challenge for Ms Whyman, who has had a Skype-style technology created so she can rehearse all of the different amateur companies at the same time. The production will travel to all nine English regions, as well as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland before returning to Stratford.

Ms Whyman said: “The challenge for me is making sure those regional voices really are in the play. I want to get a real sense of these places.”

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This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be set in the Britain of the late 1940s. “It’s about the country coming together after surviving a traumatic time and about the post war austerity. It fits with the play,” Ms Whyman said. “It will have a Dad’s Army quality about it. That sense of an ill-equipped group of people”

Written in the 1590s, the play surrounds the marriage of the Duke of Athens and follows four young lovers and a group of amateur actors called the mechanicals, all of whom are manipulated by fairies in the forest.

With RSC associate directors, Kimberley Sykes and Sophie Ivatts, Ms Whyman went around the country from February inviting amateur theatre companies to propose a cast of six for the Mechanicals and Bottom. They met almost 600 people “and we put them through their paces” before they cast their amateurs in the summer.

Companies include the Belvoir Players in Belfast, The People’s Theatre in Newcastle and The Canterbury Players.

The amateur actors involved range from pub landlords, to nurses and estate agents. “It’s extraordinary, they go to work and then pitch up in the evening and I tell them how the scene works,” the director said. “It is quite like the challenge set by the mechanicals by the play; a carpenter, tinker and a weaver suddenly having to put on a play.”

Among the 14 Bottoms is Peter Collett a primary school teacher in Truro in his 20s and Barry Green in Bradford, who “is quite a lot older,” Ms Whyman said. Two women will also play the part, Lisa Nightingale in Canterbury and Becky Morris in Nottingham. While Dawn French has played Bottom “it’s hardly ever been played by a woman.”

“The advantage is the play supports the idea. Titania has never met Bottom,” Ms Whyman said. “We are just grasping the nettle and saying what if that was really what it felt life.”

In September, the directors started visiting schools to cast Titania’s fairies. The RSC team taught the children’s 58 teachers the song they want them to sing onstage – Titania’s Lullaby – and they will speak the fairy blessing at the end of the play. “It’s quite ambitious, these young people will speak Shakespeare and sing it,” Ms Whyman said. “There is something delightful about the enthusiasm of the children.”

She added: “I have said absolutely no animals. A few companies wanted to put a real dog on stage. There has to be a limit.”

The professional cast start rehearsals in January ahead of the first performance at Northern Stage in Newcastle in March. The cast will tune in every Wednesday and Thursday evening to view the amateurs work ahead and will have a brief time to rehearse together.

Ayesha Dharker, who is playing Titania, queen of the fairies, said: “They’re saying the professional company will have to make it as comfortable as possible for the amateur actors but it’s the other way around. They’ve been preparing for months in a Shakespeare boot camp.”

The actress, who has been in Coronation Street and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, said: “This is like running away with the circus and I think it is going to be amazing,”