The programme for the Open Air Theatre’s production notes that: ‘Everyone plays lost and found during A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a bitter dispute over an orphan child provokes the dissent between Titania and Oberon. Until the twentieth century, however, productions were sugar-dusted with wonder’.

There is little danger of too much sugar-dusting in Ian Talbot’s production of the play. Puck and the other fairies make their entrance in bovver boots and with shaved heads, looking much more threatening than usual. Their usual mischievous, ironic attitude is turned into something altogether more threatening, and Puck himself is positively loutish. This emphasises the play’s more carnal and even bestial aspects as opposed to the more romantic fairytale elements, but it perhaps also goes a bit too far, sacrificing a bit too much of the dream-like aspect of the fairyworld.

At various points, actors freeze, and also simulate speeded-up running. There are some well-executed sound effects, and the natural trees surrounding the set are put to the use of being shaken at one point. The set consists of three astroturfed hills (which the actors frequently slide down) and a lawn in between them, with a fake rabbit hole also brought in to play. All the actors are dressed in Edwardian-style clothes, apart from the fairies, Theseus and Hippolyta (who at one stage appears in riding outfit complete with crop - fittingly, as she is an Amazonian in the text). Bottom and the other mechanicals are well-portrayed, Bottom in particular achieving a degree of plausibility as a human being which is normally not attained in productions, many of them playing him as just a figure of fun, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Although the performance is enjoyable to watch, it doesn’t seem to gel together into a satisfying whole. Many scenes are played for extra laughs with the addition of physical comedic action not in the text; the actors’ singing seems incongruous, and as a whole it seems unbalanced. Having seen the production and then gone back to the text, it struck me that in many ways the poetic truth of the original play is the transformative power of dreams. However, this theme was almost entirely obscured in the production.

To give one example of where the production does well: the scene in which Titania wakes up next to a donkey-headed Bottom and immediately falls in love with him because Oberon has bewitched her. As the two of them exit the stage surrounded by Titania’s attendant fairies, one of the fairies covers himself in a sheet and walks behind Bottom, bent forwards like the rear end of a traditional pantomime horse, thus theatrically completing Bottom’s transformation into a donkey. This actually seems to highlight the dream-like aspects of the play, bringing up issues of identity and the loss of it, the real and the not-real, appearance and reality, artifice and the reality of the stage. As small an aspect of the whole production as this was, it was actually my favourite moment of the entire thing, and I thought there should have been more of this. There was no doubling of parts, as in other productions, in which, for example, Oberon and Theseus have been played by the same actor. This device was used by Peter Brook in his 1970 production, as well as many subsequent ones, and it obviously highlights the dream-like aspects of the play and raises apposite questions of self-identity.

The production certainly suceeds in commercial terms of entertaining the audience, but it would be more of an artistic success if it successfully translated more of the poetry of the play, rather than just the comedic drama.

Till 2 September 2006.