★★★☆☆
Three Stars
This rampant production has a perfect setting – the foliage of New College gardens encloses the action, and bedecks the actors. A playful Puck (Rose Hadshar) lurks always at the edges, as Oberon (Charlie Dennis) struts, in a coat of leaves rather than mail, jealous that his queen, Titania (Charlotte Day) is so distracted with an exotic boy that she ‘crowns him with flowers’. Oberon contorts his face into a bizarre mask of knowing confusion which rather distracts from Titania’s rather too regal delivery, which is cut occasionally by a bark of capriciousness.
Elsewhere, the powerfully displayed emotions of Hermia (Emma Turnbull) – tired, knowing, enraged – are shown to be a product of the forest – she is a shrew, a vixen, and, most strangely, an acorn. She is restrained by the black-waistcoated Lysander (Henry Ellenthorpe-Wong), a city boy as yet unaffected by the forest setting. Lysander throughout is sparkling, displaying in turns a smooth and loquacious charm in his wooing, and a rushing earnestness. The dashing dance of the loyalties between the pair and their intertwined lovers, Demetrius (Richard Foord) and Helena (Olivia Waring), are played out literally and dashingly on stage. Helena’s mocking courage in the face of Hermia’s ferocity culminates the fight in a gleeful flight.
Next comes a beautifully modern twist – a knowingly awful play within a brilliant play. Normally this consists of the audience sitting watching actors, who watch their own players strut on a second stage (I promise, no mention of play-ception). Here, though, we all sit, barefoot on the lawn, in an Escheresque meta-triangle. A nervous, halting prologue from the players wrings an expression of bemused agony from the watching Demetrius. Shakespeare’s demonstrations of the pitfalls of the tragic form – artless alliteration; endless, interminable, overlong death throes without end; outrageous mimes; and rotten rhymes – are brought out beautifully.
It is rare, and generally worrying, that a wall has a stand out part in the play, but the wall (Margaret Woods) that separates our two lovers is acerbically dry, both in humour, and, the lovers find, to the lips. The mocking of physical theatre – 400 years before it had been invented – is surprisingly perceptive.
Throughout, this production captures the wild unpredictability of the play, making the gardens seem too tame in contrast, and releasing the audience from the cocoons of the dreaming spires. What a way to while away a midsummer night!
