A Midsummer Night's Dream (2025)

A Midsummer Night's Dream
[[File: |300px]] A Midsummer Night's Dream promotional image
Dates	15-17 May 2025
Venue	The Tower Theatre
Director	Graham Jeffery
Producer	Karen Prineas
Choreographer	Natalie Cornish

The Folkestone-Hythe Operatic and Dramatic Society presented William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream on 15th - 17th May 2025 at The Tower Theatre, Folkestone.

Foreword

It started with a thought. An inkling. How would the Fairies present Shakespeare's funniest, most enchanting comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream? Would it be a most rare vision? A thing full of mirth and magic? The summer solstice has long been celebrated with bonfires, feasting and merrymaking; midsummer is the night of the year when magical thinking is given full rein, so why not let the spirit world take flight?

So, the thought became an idea and then turned into a Dream - the Dream you are about to share. However, to make Dreams come true takes others who share the vision and I have been blessed with a true Dream team, both onstage and off. To the entire cast and crew I say thank you for sharing the magic, for bringing your exceptional talents to create a very good piece of work, and a merry. I would like to give special thanks to Karen and Natalie for their help and support. They stopped the Dream becoming a nightmare!

Thank you also, dear reader, for sharing our Dream with us. And remember; if we shadwos have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.

Enjoy the magic.

Graham Jeffery, Director

Cast

• Michael Manton as Theseus/Oberon
• Merewyn Forrest as Hippolyta/Titania
• Paul Moran as Egeus
• Jasmine Bradley as Hermia
• Andrei Gheorghe as Lysander
• Will Dean as Demetrius
• Olivia Coley as Helena
• Ashbie Woolcock as Athenian Attendant
• Steve Hawkins as Puck/Philostrate
• Ben Forrest as Bottom
• Richard Hawkins as Quince
• Chris Henry as Flute
• Andrea Reid as Snout
• Anthony Leyton-Thomas as Snug
• Navied Mahdavian as Starveling
• Charlotte Jury as Peaseblossom
• Fry Fry as Cobweb
• Bryony Griffin as Moth
• Katy-Scarlett Coveney as Mustardseed
• Millie Forrest as Ensemble Fairy
• Evie Milton as Ensemble Fairy
• Summer Bradley as Ensemble Fairy

Production Team

• Director: Graham Jeffery
• Producer: Karen Prineas
• Movement Director: Natalie Cornish
• Stage Manager: Michael Pearce
• Deputy Stage Manager: Michelle Hartley
• Lighting Design and Operation: Chris Willcox
• Sound: Chris Willcox
• Props: Myra Collingridge and Sam Mills
• Costume: Liz Rutland and Wendy Allum
• Prompt: Caroline Dowling
• FHODS Marketing: Merewyn Forrest
• Vocal Coach: Friesia Schuil
• Musical Arrangement: Luke Jones
• Illustration and Marketing: Maisie Mason
• Photography: Chris Henry, George Holness and Michelle Hartley
• Artwork/Graphic Design: Malcolm Laye and Graham Jeffery
• Child Protection Officer: Karen Prineas

For The Tower Theatre

• Events Manager: Michelle Hartley
• Front of House Manager: Gary Ingoldby-Spate
• Theatre Technician: Emil Jansen

FHODS extends its thanks to the Front of House volunteers, Chaperones and Bar Team. Anyone interested in volunteering at The Tower Theatre can contact Joanne Pearce at foh@towertheatrefolkestone.co.uk

A Midsummer Night's Dream

One of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in Athens and in the nearby forest. The play consists of several interconnecting plots, overarched by the celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen Hipolyta. Most of the action occurs in the magical woodland realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon. One theme involves conflict and confusion amoung four Athenian lovers while another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they hope to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by Fairies who manipulate the humans and the Fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania, who are engaged with their own domestic problems.

The play was written around 1595/6 when Shakespeare had probably already completed Romeo and Juliet and, although it is not known exactly with A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed, it was possibly written as an entertainment for an aristocratic wedding. It would certainly have been performed at The Theatre and, later, at The Globe.

Felix Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" in C major, written in 1842, is one of the best known pf the pieces from his suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's play.

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where axlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in: And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies. Take though some of it, and seek through this grove:"

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. His known works consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets and three long narrative poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Straford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlains Men, later known as the Kings Men after the ascension of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Straford, where he died three years later.

Shakespeare's early plays were primarily comedies and histories and he then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Othello,King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in English. In 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface includes a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: 'not of an age, but for all time'.