FringeReview UK 2025
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s Globe, in association with Headlong and Leeds Playhouse
Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Dark Comedy, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: The Wanamaker, Shakespeare’s Globe
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A sadder tale’s best for winter. In a mini-ice-age, the drastic climate changes Hippolyta outlines were real enough, we’re reminded. And real summer often a dream. In a Globe co-production with Headlong and Leeds Playhouse, Director Holly Race Roughan’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Wanamaker till January 31 comes in white.
Certainly builds as the Globe’s strongest – if not truest – Dream since (at least) their 2013 production.
Review
Sergo Vares’ Puck sits on a dining table munching a banana. Slowly. And Theseus is more jealous than Leontes. A sadder tale’s best for winter. In a mini-ice-age, the drastic climate changes Hippolyta outlines were real enough, we’re reminded. And real summer often a dream. In a Globe co-production with Headlong and Leeds Playhouse, Director Holly Race Roughan’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Wanamaker till January 31 comes in white. Dreaming here fuses characters. More mare than midsummer, more intent on waking than wonder.
Nevertheless, designer Max Johns creates a Winter’s Tale-style stage, not only all-white, but at the opening and close a large white-sheeted tablecloth with roasted pig a centre-piece. All served by the mechanicals now Downton-style staff led by Executive Chef Bottom. This suggests everything takes place in Theseus’ palace, where the lovers dream themselves downstairs to get discovered huddled together. Though an upright piano apparates where songs are sung too. Not a precise fit but a real attempt to rationalise dreams. Almost. Along with Roughan, co-director Nareem Hayat and dramaturg Frank Peschier have worked out a mostly enthralling Dream.
Often to a spooky pluck from composer Nicola T. Chang’s quartet, Vares’ Puck makes you wait. For here is also a sinister Robin Starveling twinned with Robin Goodfellow, raising his hand as the instruments strike something like the alien chord in The Cherry Orchard. He does the same when freezing the lovers, or enacting a faintly sinister Wall. Puck commands time as he munches and utters proleptic quotes. Along with music, Joshie Harriette’s candlelit design extends to lamps and some necessarily magical dimming, as well as wintry blue shadows. This is a crisp world, with sharp imaginings in its two hours twenty.
That’s because Michael Marcus’s Theseus is psychotic, BPD at least, possibly a psychopath but his actions – trashing the dining table after his Act One proclamations – sets in train a disturbed reading. Marcus it should be added is magnificent. His alter-ego Oberon, his dream self, is far more generous, inverting the usual temper of the two, though no less keen to appropriate Pria Kalsi’s Child (and terrified Flute, a superb pairing as we discover). This Theseus can be rough with Vares’ inscrutable, darkly insinuating Puck; though that’s nothing to what he inflicts on the denouement. Marcus’s “I know a bank” speech is squarely in the line of Alan Howard’s for Peter Brook. His diction is commanding; in fact nearly everyone here speaks superbly (shout to Gary Horner’s voice work). Not only that, but everyone knows who they are. Even when they’re not.
That’s as following recent tradition, lines are re-distributed (and thers’ new lines, and Shakespeare lifts). So in Act V (or Part Two as Kalsi has it, from under a tablecloth) Hedydd Dylan’s Hippolyta speaks those sympathetic-to-mechanicals lines of Theseus. From the outset the clear hostility of Hippolyta – no sympathetic connection to Hernia here – never really falters, and for good reason. As Titania Dylan entrances in a sensual, sometimes abandoned queen, though commanding and defiant, more than a match in her dream self to scorn Oberon: “then I must be thy lady” links her to enforced marriage. As Hippolyta she and Theseus train their hunting guns on each other. You might wonder why she didn’t shoot while she had the chance.
The lovers though aren’t subordinated, though doubling as fairies in this twelve-strong ensemble. There’s excellent fiery exchanges from Hermia (a seething Tiwa Lade) and Helena (Tara Tijani in a brighter register, here even more distraught) in particular. The quartet’s arguments are explosive and given weight. Demetrius (Lou Jackson, making an appealing, assured stage debut) is sexual with a responsive Helena, even as he rejects her. It’s clear they must have been lovers. So you feel the gap to their relit love isn’t that large. And the word “maid” is scorned with an inflection. It fits Hermia too, who corrects Egeus with “stepdaughter”, further loosening the bond. Lysander’s lines to “unfold” to Helena are given to Hernia (after Lysander’s initial worry at this confidence has proceeded as normal). And it’s Lysander (a noble, bashful David Olaniregun) who begs modesty, not Hernia.
Though dining clothes and a few rough Athenian weeds predominate, Vares’ lower apparel of a ballet tutu proclaims the two worlds he straddles. It flits into the dancing roles of Fairies Dannie Harris and Ben Lynn, and the strongly musical qualities of this production. Jack Humphrey’s walking-sticked Egeus morphs mostly into a memorably nervous Quince, havering and hesitant once in royal company, quietly scorned by Puck whilst in the guise of Starveling. In bearing it’s as if he’s swallowed the deleted courtier role of Philostrate whole.
Naturally the production has to find its gravity in that dream that has not bottom, and in Danny Kirrane’s gloriously truculent Bottom there’s both truth and poetry. Not the most baffled Bottom, Kirrane’s character is guild-like in his claim of “executive chef” and so quick to claim all the roles going. It’s singularly his heels not his head that’s transformed into an ass – and a head could easily have been added. Which makes his company’s fright go for nothing. Kirrane’s scenes with Dylan are uproarious; the two relish both seduction and awakening. In his final soliloquy, Kirrane’s Bottom turns Mercutio, lifting most of the Queen Mab speech (composed just months before, and fitting here), as a valedictory nod to imagination and dreaming. Do we buy it? Yes!
The rippling of Theseus/Hippolyta to Oberon/Titania where Oberon is kinder than Theseus reverses the norm; but seems truer. It’s where Theseus has after all “done (Hippolyta) injuries”. Here their fluid personalities – usually doubled – meld in earnest; and Theseus recalls somehow that Hippolyta when Titania loved Bottom. Though he was the cause. Theseus’ actions make no sense even if he remembers as Oberon.
Nevertheless this certainly builds as the Globe’s strongest – if not truest – Dream since (at least) their 2013 production. The denouement though is crude overkill for something already set up, a psychosis that needs no apology and already makes its point. “If we shadows have offended” – yes you have. A sad tale for a wintry summer, yes; but not this. We’re left with a refusal to resolve what Shakespeare’s lines, spoken here, direct us to. Who, after this, shall restore amends?
Musicians: Composer and Sound designer, Nicola T. Chang, MD/Piano/Guitar Richie Hart, Violin Alice Barron, Double Bass Carina Cosgrave, Percussion Kiyomi Seed
Movement Director Malik Nashad Sharpe, Fight & Intimacy Director Haruka Kuroda
Scenic Artist Emily Carne, Costume Supervisor Jackie Orton, Voice Gary Horner
Stage Manager Martha Mamo, DSM Rike Berg, ASM Camila Hoyos Stuttle, Stage Management Placement Olivia Gillespie
Globe Associate – Movement Glynn MacDonald, Head of Voice Tess Dignan, Head of Production Wills, Head of Stage Bryan Paterson, Head of Wigs, Hair and Make-up Gilly Church, Head of Wardrobe Emma Lucy-Hughes, Head of Company Management Marion Marrs, Head of Props Emma Hughes, Senior Technician George Dix, Stage Supervisor Faz Kemp. Casting Director Becky Paris CDG. Producer Zoe Anjuli Robinson (Headlong), Ellie James (Globe).
