After 430 or so years it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And even though Emily Lim’s new take comes less than three months after the Globe’s last production of the same play ended, it still feels like a breath of fresh air.
It’s not the most nuanced or revelatory Dream I’ve ever seen. But Lim’s USP is creating massive scale participatory public theatre works (mostly for the National Theatre). This isn’t quite that, but it uses the Globe’s large, lairy crowd to maximum impact for a production that cheerily deviates repeatedly from Shakespeare’s exact text in a joyous, almost non-stop welter of audience interaction.
The embellishments run from start to finish, with a lengthy and enjoyable pre-show that involves roping audience members into ‘auditions’ for the Mechanicals: when I took my seat I assumed the people dancing on stage were in the cast, but no – just punters, though many of them get callbacks throughout the show and one lucky attendee even gets to the play Moon at the end.
Lim has, also, hired a ringer in the shape of Michael Grady-Hall, who played an anarchic, improv-tastic Feste in the RSC’s recent Twelfth Night, and more or less reprises the character here except the role is fairy henchman Puck.
His role is actually better modulated here than in Twelfth Night, where it felt like the action kept having to stop so that he could do lengthy magic routines. But it’s easy to imagine that Lim saw Grady-Hall's performance there and thought ‘I will have a piece of that’. And rightly so: he’s a very enjoyable Puck, a woodland spirit so anarchic he constantly trips himself up, not least when he accidentally makes himself fall in love with an audience member.
It is, pretty much, a good vibes only Dream. There’s been a trend in recent years to interrogate the story a bit more: drawing out tension between Athenian rulers Theseus and Hippolyta has become virtually de rigeur; the Bridge’s recent hit take swapped the roles of fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania to fascinating effect; the previous Dream at the Globe (which ran over Christmas) was startlingly bleak and came with an actual bodycount; in the one before that Michelle Terry’s Puck was a folk-horror monster.
Lim’s take isn’t vacuous, but interrogating the more problematic elements of the play isn’t her focus. Audrey Brisson’s Hippolyta/Titania is defined more by her acrobatic, otherworldly physicality than any angst.
Grady-Hall is clearly the star, but it’s well cast all round and Adrian Richard is particularly fun as a Bottom who registers less as a spectrum-y oddball, and more as a charismatic but overearnest Tom Cruise type.
Aldo Vázquez’s design and Jim Fortune’s score evokes a bucolic half-Elizabethan England, full of maypole dancing and folk songs. There’s little pretence we’re in ancient Athens (if there ever really was) and it all feels like a nice nod to the ubiquity of this play of an English summer. At the same time the precise nature of the setting feels a bit wishy-washy, and it’s difficult to discern if Lim has a point to make with her production beyond ‘I heart interaction’. But actually… I think that’s enough? By the time it all ends in a virtual apocalypse of bubbles it’s safe to say that you will have been charmed.
