This latest entry in London’s unending stream of Midsummer Night’s Dreams has plenty of ideas. But does Atri Banerjee’s production have a single coherent central idea? If it does, I couldn’t see it.
And not for the trees. Naomi Dawson’s set isn’t a bucolic forest but a sort of unadorned wooden copy of the steps on which the audience sits, which later opens up to reveal a dressing area with a marginally more foresty look. The quote ‘this green plot’ is ironically printed at the top.
The minor fairies also hang out there: they are styled as a hippie-ish band who play the new agey ballads specially written for this production by rising theatre polymath Maimuna Memon.
Add to this a fairly standard quartet of runaway lovers, a largely timid group of Mechanicals dominated – for better or worse – by Nadeem Islam’s cacophonously exuberant Bottom, and the main fairies, who leave little impression beyond Oliver Huband’s adorably hangdog Oberon, who seems to be dressed for a night of disco dancing.
There are so many concepts flitting around that it can be hard to focus on what’s actually going on. The design recalls Jamie Lloyd’s MDF period, but Lloyd really committed to the bit in his stark, pared-back productions. Banerjee has disco fairy kings and songs that get in the way of all that: at one point it takes Jenny Rainford’s Titania about five minutes to go to sleep because there’s an entire number about it.
It’s just a bit disjointed, and less of a laugh than it should be. Characters make less impact than ought: George Bruce’s slight, disgruntled Puck is lost in the mix, about the least memorable I’ve seen. It’s a delicate point, but as Bottom, deaf actor Islam doesn’t always feel as well supported as he could be – he’s not very integrated with the other Mechanicals, who do little to match his louder volume and slower pace when he’s talking. Later on, he switches to more graceful BSL (with Quince and Puck translating), which would be be a neat conceit if it just related to the play within the play, but in fact it starts before that. It’s not especially clear why he has literally switched languages three quarters of the way through the show.
Scrape away all the conflicting conceits, and you have a relatively sunny take on the play, free of the recent trend for darker interpretations. MVP Huband brings an extremely likeable vulnerability to Oberon/Theseus. But even the underlying cheeriness feels like an odd contrast to the show’s more Brechtian stylistic trappings.
The thing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that it gets done a lot, so a director really needs to bring their A-game, or at least be reasonably entertaining. There is no real reason to see this Dream over the much more accomplished and enjoyable one currently running at the Globe. A lot of colourful ideas, but they’ve all been swirled together to form a beige slog of a show.
