Part of a Larger ‘Professional’ Tour… and this performance was part of ‘Shoreham Wordfest’

This lively, five hander reduction of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is attractively staged. The Shoreham Centre’s large first floor Council Chamber is festooned in flowers (who made the papier-mache vegetation-filled swans at the entrance?) and lit is soft lilacy pinks and turquoisey blues. There is no blackout so we watch dusk fall though the trees outside the long side window and feel as if we are outdoors but without the rain and cold. There’s no raked seating but sight lines more or less work.

A highly talented cast of five have the simplest possible ‘tiring house’ – just a small space behind a screen in front of which is small rostra-built playing area. In the event, of course, they use the space in front of the ‘stage’ and the whole auditorium to good effect especially for the chases.

Of course Bowler Crab isn’t the only company to present Shakespeare with a bijoux cast but founder director Stephen John (who plays Egeus and Bottom) has some impressively original ideas. Hippolyta is mentioned but never present in body. Theseus becomes a female duke played with a highly plausible louche ennui with occasional spurts of decisiveness by Jessamy James. James (whom I have seen before, when she was training at Cygnet Theatre) then becomes a bespectacled, anguished Helena, a feisty Titania and a hilarious Snug, wearing a woolly hat and being a gloriously unconvincing Lion. She is a multi-talented actor.

Other good ideas include representing the fairies as puppeted, gauzy twittering insects and the funniest fight between Lysander and Demetrius (Keiran Kerswell and Jack Cameron respectively – both good) while the girls are quarrelling, that I have ever seen at this point in the play.

The multi-roling is nicely managed with a lot of outstanding voice work. Emma Kemp, for example, plays Hermia – all twittery teenage infatuation – in RP but doubles as a very charismatic Scots Puck holding the audience in the palm of her hand every time she appears. Bottom should, of course, be a stage stealer and he is. Stephen John knows how to coax every possible nuance out of this role and he’s hilarious – especially as Pyramus once we arrive at Shakespeare’s timeless version of The Play That Went Wrong. We then, very neatly, segue straight from it into Puck’s last speech and that works well. I always think the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Shakespeare wrote it is clumsy – like the last bars of a symphony with a lot of dominant seventh chords uncertain of how to reach a resolution. John’s decisive version is better.

Inevitably there are a lot of costume changes, which can’t be easy behind that small screen, and sometimes they take a few moments so other characters amuse the audience. There’s a really silly but very amusing dance to a xylophone tune while a couple of characters move props. And at what would normally be the beginning of Act 5 John, in role as Bottom, does a bit of stand-up with puns, joking about hoping that the cast will hurry up and that’s fun. The whole text, meanwhile, is studded with asides in 21^st century colloquial English. This is a fashion in Shakespeare productions at the moment but none the worse for that. It makes the comedy even funnier.

This year Bowler Crab is celebrating 10 years of presenting Shakespeare (five different shows)  in a range of venues and is available for appearance at events and for work in schools.

www.bowler-crab.com

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/a-midsummer-nights-dream-11/