It was my first attempt at a story ballet, and I was over the moon. I would have somehow made it work with 10 or with 100 dancers. And so, in 1996, Wheeldon started crafting a ballet based on William Shakespeare's comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Shakespeare's beloved comedy takes on the eternal themes: love, jealousy, and unreality. The action turns around the romantic infatuations of a love quadrangle, an approaching wedding, and a clumsy acting troop. It foregrounds the changeability of passion, the agony of unrequited feelings, and the delights of lust. Experiencing the play might feel like drifting through dreams in the small hours of the morning, the real and the fantastical weaving inextricably together. It's both hallucinogenic and sharply lucid theatre.
There are productions that are pulled out of the operatic closet over many decades, veritable warhorses some of which creak and groan like ancient equines bearing a load that they are no longer fit for. But tonight's revival of Sir Peter Hall's classic 1981 Festival production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream' with its fine young cast, was met with a roar of approval from the autumn season crowd and still felt as magical and dreamlike as ever.
