Today, we looked over the duel scene between Lysander and Demetrius and leads on to the argument between Hermia and Helena.
We explored ways to make this scene entertaining and engage our target audience. We originally thought about keeping it to a real duel but instead of with swords, they battle with comical objects such as cucumbers or brooms. As funny as this would be, we felt it wouldn't work as we'd need to already have these objects on us and the audience would be confused as to why we were holding vegetables during the tenser dialogue scenes. We don't want the focus to be on the silly weapons until it gets to the actual duel.
Instead, we made the duel more slapstick and had Demetrius begin with a low blow followed by Lysander going for a quick punch. This then goes into a pathetic, childish grapple which the girls are really embarrassed about. Having these two manly contenders for Hermia's heart (or Helena's at this point in the play) result to slapstick headlocks is very comical and we felt that the audience would find this very funny. Oppositely, when Hermia and Helena fight a little later, they engage a lot more violently than Lysander and Demetrius did. Hermia begins viciously grabbing Helena's hair then jumps on her back. She later charges at Helena twice like a bull. We felt that these violent tendencies are very good for Hermia as it matches her anarchic attitude we've given to her and Lysander.
We then carried on through the script just before the Titania and Bottom's scene. For the section where Puck gathers all of the lovers, we have him disguised as a tree with branches in his hands and when he speaks to a lover as another character (e.g. talking to Lysander as Demetrius), James mouths the lines while the actor offstage will actually say them. We think that the audience will think this is really clever and appreciate the skill needed to lip sync.
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