Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chichester)

Few Shakespeare plays can be as seriously enchanting as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as witness Edward Hall‘s all-male Propeller production seen
in the West End last year; but few of the Bard’s plays can also be as
unremittingly tedious, either, as witness Chichester Festival Theatre’s new
modern-dress production of the play that seeks to underline the play’s
other-worldliness (since the umbrella title for this year’s summer season is
‘Out of this World’), but drains it of romance, charm, wit and magic in the
process.

This production is shoe-horned not just into fitting the season’s concept,
but also into fitting into Alison Chitty‘s “installation set” that has
been designed to accommodate all of this year’s shows. There isn’t a moment
when the solid, wide two-level grey façade feels specific to this
production; instead, it’s a blank space into which a mostly blank
reading of the play is projected. The only extra design intervention (also by Chitty) is
to add three silver rings, absurdly manoeuvred to suggest various obstacles
encountered by the lovers in the woods, and then suspended from the ceiling
to provide a trapeze-like space for some of the fairies to observe the
proceedings from, for director Gale Edwards‘ sole directorial invention of
turning this into some kind of romantic circus.

Cirque du Soleil, however, it is not, despite the wishfully ‘zany’ dress of
the fairies in tutus and blue dreadlocked wigs. Meanwhile, an eager troupe
of young lovers hurl themselves hopelessly not just at each other but also
haplessly at the verse, and nothing escapes unscathed from the collision. I’ve seldom seen such charmless, colourless couplings of Hermia and Lysander,
Helena and Demetrius, as Akiya Henry and James Loye, Daisy Haggard and
Joe Anderson respectively bring to the stage here.

The mechanicals fare little better with their hopeless play, drearily
rehearsed and even more desperately played. “If you can’t say anything nice,
don’t say anything at all”, is good advice in life; but though it would make
this review very short indeed if I followed it to the letter here, of the
rest I am going to try to be nice by remaining silent.

– Mark Shenton