A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Published Tuesday 15 July 2008 at 10:00 by Susan Elkin

It isn’t easy to conjure up something really original to do with this magical old chestnut, but Dominic Leclerc’s re-imagining with a cast of six does what it says on the tin.

The scenes are drastically re-ordered as well as substantially cut. We start with Dale Superville’s Bottom introducing his fellow mechanicals interactively to the audience. Wall and Moonshine are improvised by children from the audience and Rachel Canning’s designs place the action in a nursery with giant toys, dressing-up box and alphabet letters in which the lovers and Titania imaginatively, and rather appropriately, become mechanical toys - jerky soldiers and dolls who look as if they’ve escaped from Coppelia.

Ben Joiner’s effete, camped-up, fruity-voiced Oberon, in a shiny, striped, caddish coat and sporting glittering, beetle-type black wings, is effective. So too is Matthew Hart’s harlequinesque Puck with his balletic physical presence and pleasing vocal range.

Strongest of the strong cast, however, is Superville who gives us an appealing, forceful and outrageous Bottom, although the love scene with Titania (Annette McLaughlin, who doubles as Quince and Helena) is played quite gently - presumably because this show is billed as, “For anyone aged six and over”.

Simon Deacon’s quirky, rhythmic, and evocative music, to which Superville dances several times on a hobbyhorse, rather ingeniously borrows the occasional chord or cadence from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music - a clever touch.

On a sunny weekday afternoon when almost the entire audience consisted of school parties, nearly every child was fully engaged throughout - a sure sign that this innovative and thoughtful production works for those it’s aimed at.