OUR MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Written by Charly & Robyn Faye
Last summer, we were among more than one hundred people who took part in Compass Collective’s crazily brilliant 24-hour Shakespeare Marathon for Refugee Week - and we loved it!
So this year, when the call came out for people to create performances or hold readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on 21st June for Refugee Week, we knew that we had to be involved. We’re both actors, we’re passionate about Shakespeare, and we’re also committed to supporting the brilliant work of Compass Collective.
When we thought about how to approach this new challenge we decided that we would like to experiment with an all-female (including trans and non-binary) production, partly because the theme for Refugee Week this year is “Community as a Superpower”.
Image Credit: Jonathan Banks
So much comfort can be drawn from community, and we want to draw inspiration from the community we know best. We have had the opportunity to work with many fantastic female artists and know the power and influence women can hold.
Moreover, of the over 100 million people who have been forced into displacement, over half are women and girls. Women are often the first responders when crisis hits, yet their voices are often left out of policies that are supposed to protect them.
In addition to poverty and other issues that all refugees may face, female refugees face an added layer of oppression from gender discrimination. And yet, despite everything that makes being a woman, or underrepresented gender, difficult, there is something beautifully unique and magical about “girlhood” - even when this is something that is discovered as an adult.
We want to capture that magic in our production and place that joy on stage.
Visually in our production this will be represented by a recurring prop: fabric. Fabric has a history of being made by women’s hands, from people of all backgrounds and countries. We open with a pillow fort created by draping of white fabric - starting our magic in the same place that inspired our own hopes and dreams, our childhood bedrooms. As we move through our play this fabric will morph into many things: a backdrop for shadow puppetry, a cloak to conceal a character, a stump in the ground as we explore the forest and eventually a veil for a wedding. Transformation is of course one of the many themes Shakespeare touches on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and alongside the mischief and magic this is definitely something we want to play with. Always in motion, the fabric is an additional character to our story, but it is always moved by the hands of the storytellers.
We’re starting rehearsals next month and are incredibly excited that we will be performing on the 21st June at the amazing Bush Theatre. Along with the box office returns, each actor will be sponsored, so we’re aiming to raise at least £500 for Compass Collective.
You can follow our journey on social media @fracassantes and we’ll also share ticket details very soon on Compass channels.
We know that lots of other people are already signed up for the Midsummer Night Fundraiser for Compass and we hope we might have inspired some of you to join in too - it can be as simple as a few friends sat round the table reading together.
You can read more about it here.
Charly and Robyn’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is supported by Fourth Monkey and The Bush Theatre, and is a collaboration alongside fellow Fracassantes member Emma Brunet-Campain, with additional musical direction by Lizzy Lister.
