A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe

Sometimes, the best way to create a warm, communal theatregoing experience isn’t by subverting the greatest hits, but just by playing them wittily and well. Director Emily Lim has taken this directive in stride for a new staging of The Bard’s moonlit romp of spell-casters and seductions, less lavish than the Bridge Theatre’s recent production, but with a more than compensatory return of focus to the language, and the Globe as an ideal venue for ample crowd participation.

Though there are regular interludes of song and dance (Harry Nilsson’s One is a new favourite of Bottom and Queen Titania), this Midsummer Night derives much of its energy from the refreshingly old-school source of smart casting. Particular standouts are Adrian Richards, perfectly pompous as Bottom, (whose Theatre Kid From Hell bonafides are cemented when he appears onstage in a Cats T-shirt), Mel Lowe as a Lysander equally earnest in loves both real and counterfeit, (and thus more cutting when the time comes for Lysander to harshly reject Hermia), and Enyi Okoronkwo, whose King Oberon is ethereal grace and wrathful petulance in one. For his part, Michael Grady-Hall is on familiar ground playing Puck so soon after his deadpan Feste in Twelfth Night, but he remains a reliable hand at putting a comic button on things shortly after the other players have exited the stage, and in leading the crowd in a succession of vocalisations and chants.

Crowd work is at the heart of this production, with multiple active (even speaking) roles assigned to game audience members, and the cast taking their places among them to witness Bottom’s final staging of The Most Lamentable Comedy and the Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. Even at intermission, you’ll spot them in character, bobbing and weaving through the audience while crying out for the object of their affection. The contents of the play itself will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has already seen the show staged (Nicholas Hytner’s production had more of a twist in its tail, putting Oberon in place of Titania when it came time for a Fairy monarch to turn infatuated with Bottom in the shape of an Ass. Titania has that role back here), but it’s all suffused with such lively, loving spirit that one is hard pressed to imagine anyone walking away not in the least bit cheered by it.

Ultimately, this warm rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream kickstarts the Globe’s summer season on a celebratory note of communal togetherness, with a uniformly strong cast leaving their own stamp on the material.