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Byron Mondahl as Flute and Chris Donnelly as Bottom, in the Tobacco Factory Bristol production of Midsummer Night's Dream (Picture: Toby Farrow)
By Sophia Lomax
This hands-up magical production of A Midsummer Nights Dream might as well come with free 3D glasses on every seat, so urgent and involving is its take on folk lost in a forest at midnight.
Sure, it’s comedy – one of Shakespeare’s rightly most beloved and riddled with double, even treble, entendres. But the fairies here have agendas to pursue and chaos on their minds. They also look like the Pet Shop Boys: little girls looking for wands and sparkles would have nightmares.
It’s the brink of wedding season: Theseus, Duke of Athens, is to marry Amazonian queen Hippolyta. So far, so grand set-piece. In comes nobleman Egeus, full of didactic pique, asserting ancient Athenian paternal rights when daughter Hermia threatens to uncouple the arranged marriage he’s set up. Faced with the alternatives offered by Theseus – imminent death or incarceration in a nunnery – Hermia makes the only sensible choice for a teenager in besotted mode – elope with boho-rebel, Lysander.
The young whippersnappers are beset variously by thwarted love and unrequited passions. There’s Helena too, played fizzily and desperately by Rebecca Pownall, in hot pursuit of Demetrius, whom Egeus plans for Hermia to marry. They soon all become tangled up like Granny’s knitting, lost in a peculiar midnight-soaked forest filled with the havoc-wreaking, renegade Puck, who is given jumpy rein by Christopher Staines, seemingly able to play any instrument under the moon. When the fairies meddle with everyone’s affections using mind-altering ‘love juice’, rivers of tears are inevitable.
Into this emotional whirlpool jump the ‘rude mechanicals’, rehearsing their play for Theseus. Director Andrew Hilton puts a characteristically deceptive simple spin on their cavorting and the result is fine humour thousands of miles from the labourers’ pantomime often churned out in productions.
Chris Donnelly, as Bottom, is wholly endearing – he can be tall only on tiptoe – but his brief flirtation with becoming an ass and lover of enchanted fairy queen Titania is suddenly unsettling in its intensity and he’s all the more convincing for it.
Harriet de Winton’s design, with costumes spanning centuries and including a lovely small, blue-faced puppet, has a sharp cohesiveness which belongs to the Dream’s own near-perfect construction. Patent brogues jostle with sunglasses, Vuitton-esque mouse ears and one mightily effective appearance of deely boppers, those brilliant bug antennae on headbands, sported by Alan Coveney playing a twitchy, elegant mechanical Robin Starveling.
It’s comic mayhem, heart-splitting loneliness and a sharp lesson in class politics all rolled into one.
Waves of applause engulfed the 2010 cast of the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory company; and rightly so.
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