2008/2009 SEASON PLAY

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Playhouse

Murai Kunio, Asami Rei, Cho Songhaetc.

	S	A	B	Z
Price(yen)	6,300	5,250	3,150	1,500

A powerful and seductive “magical evening” presented to you by John Caird. Enter the world of this dreamy romantic comedy for one evening of theatrical celebrations.
This play was incredibly popular when performed in May and June of 2007, and it is making a return in early summer 2009. In 2007, NNTT invited John Caird, Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to direct the play with flair and power choosing the best Japanese cast for a wide-ranging audience. Caird’s careful characterization, collaboration with a live band, merry dancing, sumptuous set design, and creative costumes were all combined together to make this production highly praised. This re-presentation will feature the same cast as the premiere performance. The cast was rigorously selected in auditions by John Caird himself, stage design by Sue Blaine is radically creative and imaginative as acclaimed at the RSC, Ilona Sekacz colorfully rearranges Mendelssohn’s music, and together with the Japanese staff, this will be a powerful rendition of a timeless classic.

The drama unfolds on a midsummer night before the celebration of the wedding of the duke of Athens and the queen of the Amazons. Hermia refuses to comply with her father ’s wish for her to marry his chosen man, Demetrius, and decides to elope with her lover, Lysander, by escaping at night through the forest where the fairies live. Demetrius, followed by Helena who is in love with him, chases after the two of them. In this forest near Athens, the king and queen of the fairies are quarreling over the queen’s page-boy. Enter the mischief-loving fairy, Puck. At the king’s orders, Puck obtains a love potion, and they play a trick on the queen and others. As a result, the queen finds herself spending an enchanted evening with Nick Bottom, a weaver whose head has been transformed into that of a donkey! Fairies and people, men and women, the everyday and the dream world. How will this tempestuous evening of merry romance end?