Directed by Conor Cook

If you’ve read, seen, taught, studied and written about a play as much as I have A Midsummer Night’s Dream every line is as familiar as your own fingers. It’s a delightful surprise, therefore, to see a production which has actors speaking the text in freshly nuanced ways and features some interesting directorial ingenuity. It also made me giggle throughout, often in places I’d never found especially funny before.

Six talented actors have to do a great deal of doubling but they are so good at it that it barely notices. Distinctive accent work – another strength – helps to make it work. Sadie Pepperrell, for instance is just a frightened girl in love as Hermia. She then gives us a Starveling who is so terrified of being in a play that s/he shakes continually, his/her mouth working. As First Fairy she is sexy, knowing and otherwordly with a London vernacular voice. I also really liked Jack Jacob’s performance as Peter Quince, fussing about and, a totally incompetent director, trying to get his actors to toe the line and keep them happy.  As a stereotype it’s only just exaggerated. He also brings a cocky, insolence to Lysander which I’ve never seen stressed before but it sits well with the text and situation.

Yvette Bruin and Elizabeth Prideaux play both the Theseus and Hippolyta and Oberon and Titania pairings  as lesbian relationships with Bruin being bossily, gruffly mannish in both roles. Prideaux is wonderfully plausible at the beginning as a Hippolyta who wants nothing to do with it and is clearly repelled by this political marriage she has to undertake. She also delights as angry misunderstood Helena and as bored Snout who has a drink problem.

Nicholas Southcott, who also plays Demetrius, is terrific as Bottom – interfering and arguing, dominating every conversation and very funny when he manages to produce donkey brays which sound like sexual arousal.  His acting is so intelligently detailed that even when he’s asleep in Titania’s arms he twitches his face as a donkey probably would. He loads “I could munch your dried oats” with delicious innuendo too.

The attractive costumes, designed by Heather Simpkin are more or less Grecian and quite complicated. So there are many costume changes which are neatly accommodated by giving some of the speeches to different characters. For instance Sally Sharp as Egea, who also does a lovely northern Puck, gets “My hounds are bred out a Spartan kind” as a soliloquy with a rather good mime of playing with a dog which gives other characters time  to get into their Mechanicals costumes. She then slips in to join them as Snug, almost unnoticed a few minutes into the next scene.

I’ve always understood that when Shakespeare uses continuous rhyming couplets it’s a signal not to take what’s happening too seriously. There’s a lot of that in the central three acts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream while the action is in the wood and this production leans on it which heightens the comedy. There are however some rather odd pronunciation decisions such as “ere” to rhyme with “here” and putting the stress on the second syllable in “promontory”.

This is a very funny, pacey (2 hours with interval) Dream in which the meaning of every word is clear even though it’s very true to the original text. The asides in modern English occur mostly in the Mechanicals scenes where they really add to the humour. I’m not sure we really need the rather banal songs at the beginning, end and before the interval though. They don’t add anything worthwhile.