REVIEW: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Reading Rep

I have had the most rare vision. I had a dream: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A play within a dressing room within a play within a theatre… I hope you’re following! 

Paul Stacey’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Athenian comedy is set in a dressing room of a theatre, with the set emulating the rough-and-ready backstage areas that will be familiar to anyone who has crossed the threshold at a theatre. Dressing tables, boxes, instruments, and costume rails make up the space, with a scaffolding tower dominating the stage in front of an enormous moon. The actors arrive for work (and yoga) before the dominating director bounds in and decides to workshop his new play ‘Bottoms Dream’ which will be performed for the Jubilee. From here we go on a journey through an abridged version of the Elizabethan classic, with modern twists and feverish energy. 

The direction from Paul Stacey and Chris Cumming does away with most of the conventions that you may expect from a Shakespeare play. The actors easily move between their actor characters and their Shakespearean characters, showing wonderful distinction both between the two and between their multirole characters within the Athenian world. David Fishley’s Oberon is powerful and distinguished, and his voice resonates around the theatre with strength and heart.

REVIEW: A Midsummer Night Dream at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury

A Midsummers Night Dream is perhaps Shakespeare's best known and most accessible play and the famous lines pop up throughout any production. But its very popularity means anyone approaching producing the play seeks to find a different way of staging the show to differentiate it from what has gone before. Paul Hart's production returns to the Watermill after a run at the Wilton Music Hall and he sets it as a troupe of Victorian music hall musicians putting on the play on a bare stage with just a couple of stage cloths. He also follows the general trend for gender blind casting with a female Bottom and female Puck in an Ensemble cast of ten (5 males, 5 females) and adds 20th century music to freshen up the presentation played by actor musicians. It's a nice idea and for the most part works very well but occasionally the energy drops and then it feels laboured and overdone.

Victoria Blunt as Bottom (until 22 February when she is replaced by Emma Barclay who was so funny recently at The Watermill in One million tiny plays about Britain) steals the show with her joyous expressive face and high energy, she is able to make the most of the comic opportunities . She brings a fresh feel to her dreamy liaison with Titania as an ass (with a simple headdress and glorious buck teeth) and revels in her interruptions in the Mechanicals scenes. I have no doubt that Emma Barclay will be able to do the same.