About

As Director Tim Welham argues, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an absolute masterpiece” - and, he adds, one uniquely relevant to the contemporary moment. 

Tim has adapted Shakespeare’s text to create a story that centres women and explores the themes of queer love and desire, bringing it “out of Ancient Greece or Elizabethan England and into today.” Lysander is replaced with the feminine Lysandra; thus, the forbidden love of her and Hermia becomes doubly critical of the traditional social norms that threaten to keep them apart. In the case of Hermia, these norms threaten her very life.

 

Hermia’s father Egeus, who forbids his daughter’s marriage to Lysandra and insists that she instead marry a man of his choosing, is replaced by Egeia - a mother whose support for the homophobic, patriarchal system of ancient Athens is not diminished one bit by her gender. These recastings ask the audience questions of love, agency, social constraints, family dynamics, discrimination, and representation. 

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Tim feels that out of all of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the one most suited to undergraduates. As he puts it, “The characters are mostly young people, so the themes are closest to the students’ lived experiences; and the story itself can be easily transplanted into today’s world in order to explore issues that feel very much of the current moment.” 

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Shakespeare’s classic story, in Tim’s hands, is transformed into a world that feels both magically surreal and achingly contemporary all at once; indeed, it becomes a waking dream, where worlds real and imagined meld into one another.

 

A dream to bend or break the bars that lock us into certain ways of thinking, to question the inevitability of the world that exists, and in the end to visualize alternatives that are freer, more equal, and more human – this is the kind of Dream we want to create. 

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As Tim says, “I think we all need to dream now. We have to imagine a better future.”