‘Merry and tragical. Tedious and brief’ is how the play with a play staged at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is described. While nobody could accuse this co-production between the Globe and Headlong as being tedious, it otherwise feels like it could have otherwise been patterned off that contradictory description.
Brief is easy: the show – co-directed by Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hayat – is a miraculously short two hours and ten minutes, something largely achieved by embracing the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s lack of set change opportunities and sort of collapsing all the scenes together. Max Johns’s set is a pure white affair – a nod to it being winter (there’s a little snowman at the top), but also sterile and inorganic, more suggestive of the palace sequences that bookend the play than the magical Athenian woods in which most of the action occurs. Do the characters actually leave the palace? Is it even a palace? There is the suggestion that this is all happening in an asylum: it’s not an especially clear suggestion, but it certainly somewhat accounts for both the set and how genuinely deranged Michael Marcus’s Theseus and Hedydd Dylan’s Hippolyta appear to be, with fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania (who Marcus and Dyland also play) seemingly their mellower alternate personalities.
It’s certainly merry: perhaps the most successful innovation here is turning the light relief rude mechanicals into the serving staff at Theseus and Hippolyta’s feast at the start. It’s a funny concept, amusingly executed, especially when it becomes apparent that the reason Danny Kirrane’s Bottom – the chef – is so enthusiastic about volunteering for parts in the play is because he honks a couple of lines at the end of his shift. Another fun innovation is having the mechanical Starveling – usually an entire extra character – simply being a creepy magical disguise adopted by Sergo Vares’s sinister Puck, who starts interfering way earlier than is usually the case.
It’s all quite fizzily different to a usual Dream. It’s acerbic and weird but also feels quite big hearted: Kirrane’s Bottom is funny but far more dignified and down to earth than the character usually is. It is questionable whether he actually transforms into an ass or not, and there’s a genuine tenderness between him and Dylan’s gothy Titania that lingers through the end scenes.
Tragedy is the weird one. For the sake of spoilers I won’t get too far into specifics, but right at the end some deaths occur that most certainly do not in Shakespeare. To be honest it’s not really tragedy because the play is not structured to make said deaths tragic. But it’s certainly sad and unexpected and leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. I’m going to be honest: I can’t work out why Roughan and Hayat did this. I could maybe come up with a theory if you simply isolated the end scene. But as the climax to the play as a whole I found it entirely baffling. Perhaps if somebody sat me down and explained it to me like I was five I’d feel very silly. But to it felt like a cruel, capricious whim that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, ending an enjoyably spikey Dream on a note of pure WTF.
