A Midsummer Night's Dream
Novello Theatre January-February 2009

Gregory Doran's RSC Dream is essentially a recycling of his 2006 production, though with a lot of the sparkle diminished, and few of the changes real improvements.

The play is indestructible, and even a fairly lacklustre version will always be fun. But I saw this with someone new to the play, and I did not see in her the transports of delight other productions have inspired in other Dream neophytes.

(Reminder: mismatched lovers meet fairies, magic love potions complicate things, Bottom gets an ass's head, Puck says mortals are fools - that one.)

In what is becoming almost the standard design, Doran makes the fairies bedraggled punks and goths, with Puck (Mark Hadfield) an ageing, rather earthbound satyr.

Neither Peter de Jersey's Oberon nor Andrea Harris's Titania has much of the magical or passionate about them, a couple of flying sequences are particularly awkward, and only the fact that the fairies remain onstage through much of the play, mocking and reacting to the humans' behaviour, generates any fresh comedy.

The four young lovers are characterised in familiar ways, Kathryn Drysdale's Hermia taking the power of her prettiness for granted and well on her way to becoming a shrew, while Natalie Walter's Helena is the plain-Jane best friend who - if this were a teen movie - would blossom in the last reel. Edward Bennett's buttoned-down Demetrius and Tom Davey's louche Lysander become indistinguishable by the forest scenes.

Doran's conception of the amateur actors is not especially imaginative or funny, and Joe Dixon is one of the least individualised or impressive Bottoms I've seen. Their climactic performance of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is funny - it is simply impossible for that foolproof twenty minutes not to be - but it never approaches the double-over-with-pain-from-laughing funny I've seen others take it to, though Ryan Gage's Thisbe comes close to stealing the whole show.

No production of the Dream can be a failure - the play is simply too good for that to happen - and any production is better than none at all. But this is not a particularly good one.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Midsummer Night's Dream - RSC at Novello 2009