a midsummer night's dream

On Friday night I went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with my mum and her friend. First we went to the pub for dinner (the choice was a bit rubbish really) and we all had an amazingly huuuuuuuge sandwich.

Anyway! The play was in the open air. I’ve only seen one open air play before, (which was another Shakespeare actually a couple of years ago) and I always forget the name of it so I’ll go look it up now.....it was As You Like It.

They had changed some of it to fit in with the local setting. It was at a house near me called Broughton Hall, for the Broughton summer festival. All the characters were in Victorian dress, and they had combined it with the story of the two girls who apparently found fairies in Cottingley woods and photographed them (famous story, it turned out to be a hoax).

If you don’t know the story of msnd – it’s basically there are two couples of “real” people, who love each other and don’t love each other – they all seem to love the wrong one, then there are the “fairy” people, who mess with the heads and hearts of the “real” people, and then there are a set of actors who are putting on a play at the end of the play – if you see what I mean ;)

So the “real” people (in the play) came from Broughton – Oberon (king of the fairies) says “you’ll know him by his Broughtonian clothes”. And the forest part of it is set in Cottingley – there’s the link with the story of the photographs of the fairies.

The first scene was set round the back of the house – we all sat up a hill, and then for the second scene we walked to the stables, then walked to where the rest of the play would be – on a patch of grass in the grounds.

It was quite cold for some of it, August hasn’t been the hottest of months, but I didn’t really notice. It was so good to watch the play and have the sun go down around you. Whenever there were fairies on stage they had lighting on them that was lots of small dots moving around – that was really effective when it was dark.

I thought it was wonderful! I really should do that more often ;) I’m definitely going to look into it every summer – where are there outdoor performances near me.