A Midsummer Night's Dream with a taste of Polensia Oct book launch...

Looking forward to our next book launch of a series next week on Thursday at Mt Roskill library (first library out of the South Auckland region) with the first of my Shakespeare adaptations. In fact, this book was again written some 20 years ago in being the anniversary of my leaving teaching as a High school educator and moving into tertiary and adult education.

This particular book was a rewrite of Shakespeare's most famous comedy play, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" written around the 1600s when William Shakespeare was at his peak and this play is quite the sophisticated mixed sub-plots genre where there are several characters working on different agendas at the same time and culminates in order restored after quite a bit of chaos for the characters in question.

I remember enjoying studying Shakespeare at Uni and instead of reading the book, I remember going in the recording labs and listen to the origin play and following the script, in it's old English form, acted out by actors and it was like I was at the theatre (using my imagination) and using ear phones. And that was how I would teach the play by reading it out orally. I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare in unravelling the various plots and discussing the themes and intentions of play to senior high school students.

Now I can share that interest by offering a different take in setting the play in a tropical plantation setting and the characters are similar to Samoan ideas that's where the "... with a taste of Polensia" (Polynesia) comes from.

I think that other tragedies that I might consider re-writing for this series is either Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth or Othello which are plays that I also studied or taught. I remember when I was teaching that often other teachers thought that the plays were too difficult to teach to many students at the high school level but I disagreed and went on ahead in knowing that the teacher is the one who can make the biggest difference...