A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe and on tour – review

You don’t normally expect Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to come with trigger warnings, do you? But this Globe/Headlong/Bristol Old Vic/Leeds Playhouse co-production, one of the wintriest Dreams imaginable (snow falls, the mortals are dressed for cold weather) demands them. This is not a typical take.

It’s barely even a comedy. Earlier productions, such as the LePage rockpool version for the National, which reimagined the fairies as lizard-like creatures slithering through dirt, the murky 2017 Young Vic mudfest, and Peter Brook’s game-changing RSC iteration, which this fleetingly resembles, emphasised the darkness, but director Holly Race Roughan goes further. There are few laughs but plenty of chills, cruelty and intimations of some of the worst of human behaviour, from coercion to paedophilia. If you let go of the idea of traditional enchantment, it’s a compelling piece of theatre.

There are shades of the Russian oligarchy about this Theseus and Hippolyta (Michael Marcus and Hedydd Dylan, both tremendous), he a terrifyingly volatile revolver-toting bully with a chest full of medals and she a brittle, deeply unhappy boozer. The stark elegance of Max Johns’ shiny white setting suggests moneyed opulence and the most frozen of winters. Theseus controls everyone around him, from his fur-clad, morally adrift wife to Jack Humphrey’s obsequious Egeus and the quartet of young lovers whose youthful intrigues are about to give way to harsh, frightening realities.

Bottom (Danny Kirrane, superb) is Theseus’ executive chef, robust but doggedly aware of his master’s bullying nature, the rest of the “rude mechanicals” his domestic staff, and there’s palpable tension from the outset. The fairies, in pointe shoes and tutus, are a ballet company, presided over by Oberon’s crown prince and Titania’s eccentric grande dame (Marcus and Dylan again, intriguingly distinct from their earlier characterisations). Their plane of existence has a sinister elegance, but it’s surely preferable to what the humans are living under.

Sergo Vares’ remarkable, shaven-headed Puck, in sepulchral make-up, a formal dinner jacket flying above his ballet skirt, belongs to both worlds. He’s a nightmarish figure, an unpredictable thug controlling the narrative by slicing his arm through the air as Nicola T Chang’s musical score flashes, shimmers and booms, scaring the living daylights out of down-to-earth Bottom with every appearance, and daring the audience to engage. Given what we’ve seen this Puck do on behalf of his masters, his “give me your hands, if we be friends” speech becomes less an invitation to applaud here than a troubling demand for collusion.

The four lovers whose romantic complications power the plot make less impact than usual, although Tiwa Lade’s diminutive diva Hermia is outstanding, with suggestions of real damage beneath her shiny, stroppy exterior as she rushes to point out to Egeus that she is his step-daughter (rather than blood-daughter). By contrast, the conflict between Titania and Oberon over a changeling child (beautifully played by Pria Kalsi) feels uncommonly prominent and has a really nasty, if theatrically satisfying, payoff.

Some of the verse speaking is pretty rough, and the text has been cut and messed around with (the whole thing comes in at little over two hours), but fundamentally, this is an urgent, fascinating Dream. The final “if we shadows have offended” could legitimately swap that last word out for “tormented” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a moral thriller.