a semi-staged production of Shakespere's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mendelsohn's incidental music

May 11, 2009 2:42 PM

Last night, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a semi-staged production of Shakespere's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Mendelsohn's incidental music. Now they've put a video of the performance up on their website.

Sorry if this isn't available in your area. It was actually broadcast on television last night, but only on the BBC's digital red button service something which was hardly publicised so this is a handy catch up which will be available to the end of the year.

I think it's one of the best productions of the play I've seen. It constantly subverts the expectations and implications of what a 'semi-staged' production can do and there are many wonderful moments developed from out expectation of how the cast are going to handle particular aspects of the play in a venue what should be relatively hostile venue to this kind of work.

posted by feelinglistless (17 comments total)

Bugger. Not available in your area. That BBC, always turning me to the torrents.
posted by pracowity at 2:50 PM on May 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

Feel-Bad Fact of the Day: Mendelssohn wrote the Overture when he was 17.
posted by Joe Beese at 2:54 PM on May 11, 2009

Oh, BBC, you bollock-fondling pack of churlish pricks. [Not available in my area, either]
posted by Decimask at 3:13 PM on May 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh do get a grip folks?
You know we can't see *anything* on hulu without using a proxy?
posted by ceedee at 3:16 PM on May 11, 2009

How useful is a post where the main content is only available to a small fraction of the community?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:17 PM on May 11, 2009

Foci for Analysis: Welcome to the digital ghetto. This is a common problem for non-American users, where links frequently go to Hulu, Comedy Central and so forth.
posted by dbarefoot at 3:35 PM on May 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

Foci for Analysis:How useful is a post where the main content is only available to a small fraction of the community?
HOW DARE PEOPLE FROM OUTSIDE THESE HERE UNITED STATES READ MY INTERTUBEFILTERS.

FTFY.
posted by coriolisdave at 3:38 PM on May 11, 2009

You know we can't see *anything* on hulu without using a proxy?

Yes, we do know, since someone always mentions it anytime someone links to hulu.
posted by smackfu at 3:39 PM on May 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

dbarefoot, thanks for the kind welcome but I'm typing this from Sweden so I'm too familiar with the ghetto. Here's hoping that the vid will show up around the rusty, burning oil drums of the net.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:41 PM on May 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

So, which of you net-savvy mefites will find a way for those of us in the colonies to view the BBC?
posted by Cranberry at 3:41 PM on May 11, 2009

coriolisdave: HOW DARE PEOPLE FROM OUTSIDE THESE HERE UNITED STATES READ MY INTERTUBEFILTERS.

Please clean up your soiled knee-jerk powered one-liners because I ain't seeing the funny. I am, however, mildly amused by your US-bashing and unoriginal indication that Americans are rednecks.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:55 PM on May 11, 2009

Try using a VPN with localised UK IPs (e.g. Strong VPN can do this I believe) for all your BBC iPlayer needs - otherwise it's the torrents for you...
posted by aeshnid at 4:03 PM on May 11, 2009

Actually, this doesn't seem to be torrented yet, except the audio is on uknova.
posted by smackfu at 4:28 PM on May 11, 2009

I'm generally against broadcasting filmed versions of theatrical events. Occasionally singularly significant performances wind up being preserved and that's great (and perhaps historically important), but theatre is just one of those things that you have to be there for. Everything about the performance is designed with the living, breathing audience in mind, and in that art-form atmosphere and mood are everything. I don't think a person can ever really trust their own reaction to a taped version, and snap-judgment internet culture will never be kind to theatre -- but in an effort to stay relevant theatre companies cram their show into our tiny screens anyway, hope we'll still feel something and give a damn. I wish they'd just stop.

I could rant about this all night, especially since I can't exactly watch the actual video in question.
posted by hermitosis at 5:41 PM on May 11, 2009

hermitosis - I tend to agree with you about filmed version of theatre but this was primarily a staged reading interspersed with Mendelssohn's wonderful score.
It's a long performance but well worth watching/listening once it becomes available from another source.
posted by ceedee at 2:38 AM on May 12, 2009

hermitosis: But for some us, filmed versions of theatre are the only way that we'd get to see them. It's not perfect, as you say it loses something of the electricity of being there, but I'd rather have seen this show as is than not at all.
posted by feelinglistless at 1:06 PM on May 12, 2009

hermitosis: frankly, I have a LONG list of things I wish they'd just filmed in the theater instead of adapting as a real movie. Nunsense (any of them), Tribute, Hair, or for that matter, Godspell... and that's just off the top of my head. Filming theater productions can produce a sense of falseness, but it's often better than taking a show which has been engineered for stage and audience, and turning it into something else, which will inevitably lack the fundamental *thing* that made the show fun in the first place.

I guess I'm saying, with some material, I'd rather watch a filming of something that I wasn't there for and couldn't participate in, than watch an adaptation of that something which causes it to feel neutered in the process.
posted by hippybear at 1:27 PM on May 12, 2009