Cathy Marston Reworks 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' for Zurich Season Opener

Cathy Marston has created a new production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that opened the season in Zurich, staged as a 21st-century reinterpretation of Shakespeare's comedy. The production places elves in combat boots and puts a DJ in the orchestra pit. The staging is framed by its creators as an answer to the growing presence of artificial intelligence in the arts: where art once stood, artificial intelligence increasingly appears, but the theatre is presented as an exception. The production's approach is described as achieving enchantment through disenchantment, an honest illusion in which theatrical artifice is openly displayed rather than concealed. The work thus positions live performance as a counter-model to AI-driven cultural production, demonstrating how the stage can generate magic without hiding its own mechanisms. The season opening in Zurich serves as the venue for this reinterpretation, with Marston responsible for the new staging. The article presenting the production appears in the Feuilleton section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.