A Midsummer Night's Dream (As You Like It)

And I know what it means to long for a good performance, and how ridiculous I am in this longing. Know about the excitement when the Duke (i.e. the audience) is coming to see the show tonight, and he will either burst out laughing and award you with daily sixpence annuity for the rest of your life, or behead you. And how joyful and frightening this excitement is – I also know.

 

Basically, preparations for the show, rehearsals, these eternal follies and errors, when it seems that everything you are doing is a load of rubbish and this theatre “broth” you are boiling will for ever remain an internal affair of Kostya Treplev, and you, and your small company. But this broth is so fascinating and magnetic! Because you never know what you will get in the very end! What if you make a good show?!

 

What if you make the performance of these doltish craftsmen amazing, unexpected, and all of a sudden – fabulous and stunning? Maybe, you don’t need anything else then? You just need to stage only this particular performance? And to make it not as if it is THEIR play, but YOURS? A play about the love of Pyramus and Thisbe, and about a tragic accident (the Lion) that ruined their happy union and how they both died in one day?

 

TO MAKE A GOOD PERFORMANCE... A performance, where there will be the Moonshine, and the Wall, through the hole in which our lovers talk to each other, and the Lion. It will be both sad and amusing, and we'll try to encompass entire Shakespeare with all his passions. And with his main passion to the PLAY. A combination of incompatible things, emotions over the top, inability to speak and masterly solecism, divine stammer, magic dilettantism. And silly craftsmen become poets.

 

Dmitry KRYMOV