There was a point, as the players prepared to strut and fret their hour on the stage when the setting sun hit the broad leaves of the big fig tree in Pacific Park and made them glow. At its feet, a tangle of exposed roots around the Fairy Queen's bower spread out toward the lawn where families had come with picnic blankets and lounged for a night of Shakespeare under the stars.
If there was a more appropriate setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream, it probably existed somewhere on the other side of Puck's imagination.
It was the second time the Bard's dreamy and comedic meditation on love has played in the park at the end of Hunter Street. Whale Chorus, the Newcastle-based theatre company run by thespian Janie Gibson, staged the production last summer, the success of which saw it return to a sell-out crowd on Friday night.
The company won support from the City of Newcastle's special business rates program, which collects funds from businesses in the CBD, Darby Street, Hamilton, Mayfield, New Lambton and Wallsend to redistribute to projects that promise to activate local spaces.
"We were wrapped with the response to our first season last summer," Ms Gibson said, "People came away glowing. We had a broad range of the community attend, from experienced theatre-goers to people who had never been to the theatre. The show sold out before we opened the season, so we're bringing it back."
The story follows a quartet of love-tangled friends - Helena, who is in desperate but unrequited love with Demetrius, who in turn is betrothed to Hermia, a young maid who is forbidden to marry her true love, Lysander - all living in the Athenian court of Duke Theseus who is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.
Marigold Pazar's gripping performance as Helena, the love-sick but spurned young girl whose desperate affections for Demetrius are matched only by his determination to ignore her, shone from the first scenes, which opened on the slopes of the natural amphitheatre, under the shade of the massive, central tree. As the play progresses and, by the tricks of the fairy Puck, Demetrius and Lysander profess their love for Helena, Pazar's performance fills the character with life and appears as one of the most fully drawn among the cast.
Pazar, who has several local credits to her name and who is also the co-founder of HER Productions in Newcastle, also performed as Robin Starveling, one of the "Rude Mechanicals" players within the play who break the action of the main plot with their shambling rehearsals and ultimately absurd play-within-the-play of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Evie Laurence's Hermia explodes from the pages of Act Three, sprung by the support of Sharna Harris' Lysander, as the pair deliver the biting climax of the play when the tricked lovers find themselves in a confrontation in the fairies' enchanted forest.
Harris' barbs of "you bead, you acorn" struck with the precision of pins, spurring Laurence's fierce delivery. But Harris ultimately won their audience with their dual performance of Snout and as the wall in the comical play-in-the-play, which garnered a whooping cheer from the crowd when they appeared.
The show was ultimately stolen by Roger Ly's performance as the mischievous sprite Puck (and later as the master of revels, Philostrate), mixing his Shakespearean lines with superb comedic timing, musical interludes, and clever crowd work that - in keeping with his manic pixie character - winked at the very play he appeared in.
At one point, as he muses on the magic flower that causes those affected by it to fall in love with the first person they see (and proves the tool of his tricks on the four Athenians), he breaks from the traditional form to flirt with the audience.
"Who wants this?" he said, brandishing the flower, "It's like Tinder but without the ghosting."
The production was littered with similar divergences from the traditional - sometimes planned and sometimes, more endearingly, improvised - as the players toyed with the fantastical setting of the Dream and wrangled their performances around the elements.
In the first scene of Act Three, when the Rude Mechanicals call for a calendar to see if the moon will shine on the night of their performance, Pazar dashes into the crowd calling for "a calendar! I'm not joking, we need a calendar". When an audience member offers their phone, she declares, "Thank you, good sir--oh, can you unlock your calendar?"
Then, in a moment of pitch-perfect Novocastrian serendipity, a foghorn from an arriving ship in the harbour interrupted Sara Barlow's Act Four speech as Titania, the fairy queen, with an extended blast. For her part, Barlow nailed the delivery, waiting out the horn just long enough to give a new life to the line, "Oh, how I love thee, how I dote on thee".
Adam Deusien's command of the form lent him a near-flawless portrayal as crowd-favourite Bottom, transformed to have a donkey's head in the climax. Deusien's nodding performance as the overzealous actor portraying the pompous and wordy Pyramus in the play-within-the-play was doubled by his on-point dual role as Egeus, the disgruntled courtier and father of Hermia.
And Charlotte De Wit, in the dual role as the fairy Oberon and the Duke Theseus (and incidentally, the other co-founder of HER Productions), delivered a commanding turn as both mortal and fantastical royals, peppering her performance with clever asides and improvisations during the Rude Mechanicals' performance.
"Aren't you lucky," she quipped as she shuffled among the crowd for the play-within-the-play. "You get to sit next to a king."
The production concludes with a final performance on Sunday, December 17, at 7pm.
