Sport For Jove’s acclaimed outdoor theatre season returns for its 6th season with two works revered by audiences the world over – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare and The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
Arthur Miller’s parable of mass hysteria draws a savage parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – “one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history” – and the McCarthyism that gripped America in the 1950s.
But its portrait of the ordinary evils latent in any society, of mindless, hysterical persecution through ignorance, fear of ‘otherness’ and our capacity to serve ourselves above all others make it one of the world’s most transcendent and important stories, in any age.
Damien Ryan’s new production offers an extraordinarily rare experience of this great play, a site specific haunting on the grounds of the 200-year-old Bella Vista Farm and the forest at Everglades Gardens, Leura.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ultimate expression of Shakespeare’s theatrical mastery and Sport For Jove is developing a brand new production, directed by Susanna Dowling. In the heat of the shortest night of the year, young lovers and work-a-day dreamers plunge into a world between sleep and waking, where “everything seems double”.
One of Shakespeare’s truly essential works, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like every fairy-story, warns us that family, love and friendship are fragile – when parents are selfish, their children break the rules; when love rears its head, friendships are forgotten; and that’s just the mortal world. Directed by Susanna Dowling, the Fairy Kingdom’s war over a mortal child has turned the entire “mazed world” upside down.
Join Sport For Jove this summer for a transformative journey through dreams and nightmares – a double bill of magic and the spirit world, and what happens when all hell breaks loose in the woods…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Directed by Susanna Dowling
Bella Vista Farm, Baulkham Hills: 5 – 30 December 2014
The Everglades Garden, Leura: 10 – 25 January 2015
The Crucible
Directed by Damien Ryan
Bella Vista Farm, Baulkham Hills: 12 – 30 December 2014
The Everglades Garden, Leura: 11 – 25 January 2015
For more information (including performance dates and times), visit: www.sportforjove.com.au for details.
Image: photo by Seiya Taguchi