FringeReview UK 2026

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Chichester Festival Theatre

Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Drama, Historical, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Magical Realism, Mainstream Theatre, Political, Theatre

Venue: Chichester Festival Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

What have the Raves of 1994 in common with the jesters of 1559? Apart from shocking colour taste? And how does Kingley Vale perilously near Chichester turn so revolutionary? That wealthy Titania, boyf(r)iend Oberon and his cousin Puck clearly need to be slapped with the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. A mouthful we’ve happily forgotten, it echoes an early law of Elizabeth I: to curb strolling players and their dangerous unlicenced motley. Back to Reformation basics. That’s the witty premiss of this psychedelically-infused new production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening at Chichester’s Festival Theatre, co-directed by artistic director Justin Audibert and Hannah Joss till October 17.

Set in fields near Chichester, we start with the Conservative Association, raving joyously that rave culture is now nipped before it gets too revolutionary in the hedonistic 1990s. Other notes are sounded: New Age travellers unconsciously trace 16^th century travelling players, linking with wealthy landowning rave organisers like Titania. Lords of moneyed misrule preside over this delight of misdirections, identity confusion and a waking difference.

Clearly even 1994 didn’t often feature enforced Shire marriages; but parental pressures overbore the vulnerable. This is a production where the normal Theseus/Oberon, Hippolyta/Titania doubling is dispensed with in this 25-strong cast. So Tom Kanji as a stock county MP Theseus with Celeste Dodwell’s amorous Hippolyta are less prominent. They nevertheless guy themselves as recognisable mid-1990s Majorites: Thatcher with a human grey face as it were. They ooze a chilled cocktail of ambition – and blissful complacency. Saving the fact that Dodwell doubles – as a (perhaps covert) Rave Fairy. Gavin Rasmussen’s preppy PA Philostrate is a magnificent instance of finnicky Tory camp, doubling as “Changeling a party boy” Titania and Oberon fight over. Henry Everett as Egeus Anderton perfectly embodies the bearded Family Values policeman of the Thwackam kind. It will go heavily with daughter Hermia: who’s chosen… a woman.

There’s a swirl and liveliness throughout, everything at speed (not that speed) in Jade Hackett’s movement direction. There’s no longeurs: even in those long exchanges between Titania and Oberon, elegantly truncated here. Storytelling is lucid.

Ellie Larkin making her stage debut as an ardent (yet drug-deluded) Lysanda realises her with panache, and winning reinvention. She’s a young woman clearly out to get her girl, with a touch more gentleness than most Lysanders; till of course she turns. Angela Sant’Albano as Hermia enjoys some of the plangency that Hermia in particular can always bring, being nearest to tragedy of the four: and an exuberant ferocity in her low and little phase. Freya Parks as a loping Helena truly brings out her low self-esteem before her ungrateful lover. When she says “use me as your spaniel” and “I am as ugly as a bear” you believe she’s been battling issues all her life. Her fickle, slightly vicious lover Kieran Taylor-Ford is a thoroughly convincing young Tory in Demetrius: one who might feed carcasses to hounds on a regular basis (and who’ll be curbed by a law just for his kind quite soon); but by the same token, touched with patrician grace at the end.

There’s a supremely apposite casting in Giles Taylor’s avowedly localised Quince (“Conservative Club Chairman”): he really is the text consultant in this production (more on that later), and delights in a megaphone.

Munya Chawawa – whose sheer range elsewhere is impressive – makes his Shakespeare debut as Nick Bottom. He’s immensely confident and here exudes a more middle-class panache than most Bottoms: you believe he’s a thrusting new recruit to the Conservative Association. There’s little hint of the patronised rustic Bottoms sometimes offered. This self-delighting 1994 new Tory carries a different obliviousness. Chawawa‘s sheer presence glows – literally when he’s capped with a lit-up Ass’s head (so he’s literally out of his head which vanishes in bendy neon strips). His timing refuses clod-hopping. When he works with Kishore Walker’s grown schoolboy Frankie Flute/Thisbe (also Cobweb) you see him upping Pyramus’ ante: yet Walker’s “passion” still caps Chawawa with simplicity.

There’s good work to from tongue-tied Charlie Beck’s Snug the Plumber (also Mustardseed), especially removing his lion’s head. Anna Soden’s Robyn Starveling (also a delicate Moth) gets more and more upset as the woman in the Moon, repeating her lines till she explodes. As Thomasina Snout, policewoman (and a scratching Peaseblossom), Afi Okaidja’s  stentorian Wall absolutely hob-nails her role: a bit like Constable Knapweed from The Herb Garden.

David Sturzaker as Oberon romps through the set but quickly establishes his presence, most of all linguistically (“I know a bank”) and a ringing authority. This Oberon’s entitlement comes from wealth too, but tellingly of a different kind to the arriviste Tories. It’s one of the great features of this production that nearly everything is so solidly realised in historical terms. And he and Titania act as lords of misrule as only old money and landed gentry can.

Eve Ponsonby’s Titania is one of the most deliciously realised characters of the night. Slinky and overtly sexual, when she declares “the summer still lies upon my state” she glows with a fantastical wattage. Her delivery is comic but flecked with genuine passion and – notably – aristocratic command.

Oberon’s cousin Puck seems to have put a girdle round the Rave Orbitals half his life. Shane David-Joseph makes a sparkling, occasionally petulant Puck, one touched with privilege and scorn. He’s also a fleet one though: and seems escaped from a Saki short story. There’s still Puck’s delight in mischief and a touch of malicious delight. Naturally here and in all the transformative scenes, the rational this production thrives on has to be suspended.

Joanna Scotcher’s set though does pop up magic. The upstage rustic mansion all set in diagonals is a fantastical mock-Tudor affair, with a surprise pop-up appearance of one now-vanished public amenity at the end. Through the central aperture Titania’s Mini-Moke swings through with other props: like a barouche with a large father bed in it. Scotcher’s design though extends to geometric quotes to an overhead  frozen burst of spaceship fantasia. It’s Elliot Griggs’ lighting though – extending to embedded diagonal strips and other outrageous appendages more familiar to musicals – that extends a proper rave glare. Those and Ryan Dawson Laight’s clever repurposing of 1990s-style costumes tweaked – or is that twerked – to druggy garishness.  From blue meanie Tory suits that extend to the Pyramus/Thisbe tragical comedy (a surprisingly crisp set of blue uniforms), through neon-bright rave clothes, this riot of clothing surely deserves an Order of its own.

Alexandra Faye-Braithwaite’s music fillets clever quotes and exuberant colour against occasional natural sounds. Ian William Galloway’s video beams triumphalist Conservative footage and some surprises later on.

This is above all the most rationalised production of the Dream that I’ve encountered. Magic’s in the air and still comes as a pink flower drug, but Audibert and Joss have kept this Dream in the realms of the explicable: so long as there’s moments where you can’t quite tell what manner of Dream it was.  The Amazonian conquest of Hippolyta is naturally ditched, and this slim play sliced to two hours five minutes with interval. Occasionally in text consultant Giles Taylor’s cuts, there’s an irrational loss where retention would make dramatic sense. Bottom’s “our play is preferred” is a release mechanism for the Mechanicals (or here Conservative Association) and cutting it robs that dramatic point. Otherwise credit to voice coach Carol Fairlamb and dialect work with Sally Hague. The clarity is mostly exemplary, with some cast making their stage debut.

The ravers gyrate deliriously off the stage like a bunch of benign psychedelic Bacchantes of all genders: Adhish Arul, Mariana Fonseca, Scarlette Guilfoyle, Hattie Musgrove, Jaz Reynolds, Cache Thake, Phoebe Tyler, Riley Woodford.

A fully re-imagined Dream, it’s mostly successful in suggesting a real 1994 that might just have existed. There’s disconnects in the magic, and a very slight strain on enforced marriages, but these are vanishingly small. Whilst not the most profound of Dreams, and lacking the aching pathos of the very finest, it is one of the most coherent. It knows what it is and sheer delight is the order here. Like the dream Bottom relates, this one is fleeting. But catch it and you can tell what manner of Dream it is.

Co-Fight and Intimacy Directors Bethan Clark and Robin Hellier. Text Consultant Giles Taylor, Casting Director Matilda James CDG, Voice Coach Carol Fairlamb Dialect Coach Sally Hague, Production Manager John Page, Associate Costume Designer & Costume Supervisor Loz Tait, Props Supervisor Jamie Owens, Wigs, Hair & Make-Up Supervisor Matt George.

Company Stage Manager Linda Fitzpatrick, DSM Rob Le Maistre, ASMs Zoe Lyndon-Smith, Rebecca Natalini. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan.

Published September 26, 2026September 26, 2026 by Simon Jenner