In August, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is partnering with Belvoir St Theatre to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a very special concert event incorporating Mendelssohn’s magical music and scenes from Shakespeare’s enchanting play.

You might not know that Mendelssohn wrote music for a play, but you have almost certainly heard some of it – the Wedding March is one of the best-known pieces of music ever written, and has accompanied brides down the aisle for almost 200 years.

We spoke to Belvoir’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack to learn a little more about the production, and what we can expect when we enter the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall.

How is this show different from a standard performance of Shakespeare’s play?

It begins like an ordinary orchestral concert, but as the music plays it begins to summon the characters of Shakespeare’s play to life from within the Orchestra itself. And as the concert progresses, we see the whole plot play out in and around the music – sometimes as scenes in and between the music, sometimes as a sort of silent film under the music. So it’s a kind of concert that comes to life rather than a play with music.

How does Mendelssohn’s music fit into the play? Or the play fit into the music?

Mendelssohn wrote most of this music for a particular production of the play, but quite a lot of the music was written to be played in between the scenes, rather than for the scenes themselves. A lot of the music doesn’t really match the action of the play. So we’ve decided to fit the play to the music rather than the other way around. We’ve cut some scenes and changed the order of others to do so.

Where do you start with a project like this?

Every director tackling Midsummer has to solve the question of how to create the world of the forest. As soon as the Orchestra approached us about the project I immediately had the idea of using the Orchestra and the music as the forest. I then had some really excellent conversations with Simone Young, who I admire enormously, about the constraints around putting theatre into a concert context. Then I got to work on my own.

I know the play very well so I spent a lot of time with the music and the score, listening for the ideas the music gave me, daydreaming to it as I walked, but also trying to make sense of how the structure of the pieces fits the dramatic structure of the play. I really fell in love with the music but I have to confess that I don’t think Mendelssohn had great dramatic instincts, and I think it’s telling that he never wrote an opera.

I actually did a very different first draft with a lot more of Shakespeare’s text in there, but the day before it was due I threw it out and instead proposed the idea of “dumbshow” or silent-film style action under the music, so that we could keep the focus on the music.

Was it a challenge to direct actors to fit into Mendelssohn’s musical structure, rather than Shakespeare’s written structure?

I’ve spoken above about the clashes between the play’s overall dramatic structure and Mendelssohn’s structure, and I solved those with the adaptation before going into rehearsals. The real job with the actors was on the level of the individual scene – particularly how to fit the detail of the ‘silent movie’ scenes very precisely to the individual pieces of music, which weren’t written for that purpose! But because they were written for that same general part of the play they had the right tone and energy, so we just gave ourselves over to those pieces and fitted the action to them. If the scene in Shakespeare was much longer than the music allowed (which is basically every scene), we just picked the key bits of action and reduced them down to the fit the music.

We were lucky to have a terrific musician and composer, Simon Bruckard, in the rehearsal room with us, so we were able to work very precisely with the music. It wasn’t easy, but it became very liberating once we got the hang of it. We would first plot out the story beats from the Shakespeare, then improvise them to the music, then we got more and more specific about fitting the action to the music. We turned Shakespeare’s complex poetry into short snippets of ‘silent movie dialogue’ in order to really ground the action. In time we became very precise, timing entrances and action right down to the bar and the beat.

It was quite hard, but I really loved doing it.

What do you love about Shakespeare’s play?

Oh, I love the play so much. I know large slabs of it by heart. Can you think of another play like it? It’s completely bonkers and original.

I could go on about it for hours – how brilliantly plotted it is, how it mixes comedy and beauty, how many dimensions of meaning and scales of thought and feelings it has going on in it, how completely ridiculous it is, the simple magic of its central conceit (the love juice), the way the sun rises and the dream dissipates…

Most of all though I think the Mechanicals are one of the greatest human inventions ever.

What do you love about Mendelssohn’s music?

I know I said above that Mendelssohn wasn’t a great dramatist, but he really catches the veins of exquisite beauty in the play – which I think is a great dramatic insight on his part. It’s easy to miss the beauty and only to go for the spectacle or its floweriness or its foolery and all that fairy stuff, but those opening and closing chords really tap deep into the play’s kind of dream synapses, the way it all rises up out of silence and slips back into it again. I love a lot about the music, but those chords catch me off guard every time. There’s something magic about them.

Are you excited to be putting this show on in the renewed Sydney Opera House Concert Hall?

I’ve thought of this the whole time as a kind of blessing of the reopened Concert Hall, which, like the play, is a place of waking dreams. And there’s a particular line at the end of the play which is in the Mendelssohn score, “None shall disturb this hallowed house”. I like to think that’s Shakespeare giving his poet’s benediction to the Opera House.