Review: A Midsummer's Night's Dream

That joke is about the only reference to that hoary old gag about well-endowed mules that usually infects modern productions of this play. In fact, just about every trope and cliché Dream watchers have learned to expect has been replaced, or adapted into something fresh and new.

The staging helps. As with Hytner’s triumphant production of Julius Caesar, the audience can choose to be seated or insert themselves into the thick of the action. And, as with Caesar, Bunnie Christie’s design involves several mini stages in the form of plinths that rise out of he ground like choreographed geology. Meanwhile, overhead, fairies swing and swirl like trapeze artists — perhaps a nod to Peter Brooks’ landmark RSC production of 1970, only sexier.

In fact the air here is thick with eroticism. The magic passion flower is bandied about in a way that allows just about every kind of sexuality to get a look-in and psychological sense is made of Theseus’s new-found sexual tolerance because he and his fairy counterpart Oberon, it is implied, are the same people living in parallel universes.

The same is true of Christie’s Hippolyta and Titania who both liberate their worlds from a patriarchal form of oppression. That done, it is time for the rude mechanicals, led by Hammed Animashaun’s flamboyantly gauche Bottom, to take over proceedings with their butchered version of Pyramus and Thisbe like contestants in Britain’s Got Talent.

There may be those who think all these changes come too close to changing Shakespeare’s script. But look closer and actually the language remains completely intact and everything here is true to the play’s spirit of misrule right down to the party that the production irresistibly turns into at the end.