An audience with the fairy queen

[attach id="241419" size="medium"]Anna-Helena McLean. Photo: David Schembri[/attach]

The Salesian Theatre in Sliema hosted yet another intriguing offering with Titania, a solo musical cabaret performed and created by acclaimed theatre practitioner Anna-Helena McLean.

McLean is a graduate of Royal Holloway who spent seven years in Poland as a principal member of the experimental anthropological theatre group Gardzienice. She is currently acting in a new production, The Ballad of Mick, directed by Kirsty Hously and touring throughout 2013.

Her show Titania was by turns provocative, sensual and hypnotic. The evening achieved a rare intensity with McLean alone on stage, juggling vocal acrobatics, looping and live cello. The audience was invited to join in with Shakespeare’s Queen of the Fair Folk in a series of obscure tableaux. The scenes were threaded to­gether within a narrative largely reworked (undefiled) from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Central to McLean’s performance is Titania’s intriguing love/hate relationship with her consort Oberon, and her obscene lust for the transformed Bottom. These themes supplied layers of intriguing possibility – McLean’s musical cabaret walked a fine line between frivolous fun (complete with audience members barking like dogs and grunting like swine) and a provocative exploration of Oberon and Titania’s rather dark relationship.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s defining play about the relationships and friendships of women. They’re even more complex than the messy romantic (and marital) couplings between men and women that (by Act 4) litter the stage.

McLean makes much use of one example in particular – Titania’s friendship with the mother of her young courtier, an Indian boy, “all her joy”. The woman died in childbirth and her loyalty towards this departed friend seemingly supersedes the obedience she owes to her husband, who claims the boy for his own retinue.

There’s something of Neil Gaiman here too, in the conceit of a mythical character who pops up in the present day to reopen old psychological scars

But things are never simple – is Titania telling us that allegiances among women are stronger and more profound than marital ties?

Or is this another move in the poisonous game between the King and Queen of Faerie, tugging at each others’ heart strings one minute and swearing vengeance the next? It’s an unhealthy love, encapsulated by the figure of Titania.

McLean translates this throughout the performance into the body of a lost 30-something, who pads across the stage in bare feet and black leggings, sipping at a glass of red wine and raving, singing, laughing and crying. It’s Titania reduced to an insecure and world-weary wanderer, only just realising that she’s stayed at the party too long and is surrounded by the debris of past happiness.

However, there’s a steely side to the Queen, wrapped in her fearsome strength, that won’t ever let you feel sorry for her. She gives as good as she gets, vicious and funny and sly as a fox.

This shimmering dichotomy made the clever use of music all the more interesting, with McLean’s voice both tender and terrifying against the sounds of the cello and a series of wild animal noises. It was a little like Kate Bush, only very different.

There’s something of Neil Gaiman here too, in the conceit of a mythical character who pops up in the present day to reopen old psychological scars. But psychoanalysis rapidly turns into a bacchanalia, and the audience seemed happy to oblige (especially Noel Tanti, who was excellent as the Fairy Queen’s beloved lapdog).

McLean gives us a giggling, childish fairy who is tormented and isolated, trapped by the stage as much as by the confines of verse. She fights with Oberon for the Indian boy, but she’s fighting for herself too. And when her loving husband is replaced by ‘love-in-idleness’ (the magical flower that makes her fall for a donkey-headed stranger), she opens herself to an altogether more primal experience of bodily love.

The show was preceded by a three-day workshop, where McLean explored the myriad reconstitutions of text, rhythm and physicality possible in a theatrical production. It would have been interesting to see just how her process achieves the kind of performance we watched, with its powerful overlaying of pure text and personal intuition, musical explosiveness and physical unease.

The one-hour show was a unique journey into one woman’s relationship with Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the spectre of Titania. Ultimately, it was a wonderful reminder that audiences can and should engage with Shakespeare when the material is offered as a personal artifact, rather than a staid reconstruction – made all the more powerful because of its authenticity and individuality.