A Midsummer Night’s Dream
‘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...
