A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s best loved plays through it is rarely performed in its entirety. It has a confusing plot about who is in love with whom and to whom has been administered the magic love potion. To add to the difficulty, there are three quite different sets of characters: the lovers, the rude mechanicals and the fairies.
How to perform this in the present day? Director Toby Hulse alighted on a novel solution: just add another group of characters.
Thus the lights come up on a nursery in 1905. On a stage set with a doll’s house and a rocking horse, six children decide they will put on a play. It’s going to be all about love and magic and fairies and everyone gets married in the end. The play and its complexities are therefore seen through the eyes of the versatile cast members who can explain the plot to each other when it becomes too confusing. They can even accommodate one boy who only wants to be in a play with a good stage death.
All Edwardian nurseries need a bossy girl to keep the children in order, this one is Nancy, played by Daisy Ann Fletcher who also gives herself, as a young girl should, all the important female roles including that of Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Dewi Wykes as Cecil plays Puck in a stand-out performance of technicolour mischief.
In true dressing-up-box fashion, an embroidered coverlet as a cloak and a makeshift crown turn Eric the boy, played by Andy Umerah, into Oberon, King of the Fairies. Fintan Hayeck playing Robert becomes Bottom, who gets the most laughs, traditionally for that character – Shakespeare still getting giggles from the young audience at bum jokes.
The play within a play performed by the children playing the rude mechanicals playing Pyramus and Thisbe (keep up there) is the funniest section of this work. Paradoxically for a performance which is supposed to be laughably bad, in this version it contains some of the best acting, as well as allowing Robert his hilarious, protracted death.
This universal tale of how the course of true love never did run smooth is shorn of its more prolix sections, and the physical comedy is emphasised, to the delight of the audience, but the main elements of the play are retained. The capriciousness of love is retained as a theme and the cynicism of Shakespeare about declarations of love and changing affections is still present under the humour.
Southwark Playhouse works to bring new productions of Shakespeare to a modern audience. It is done successfully in this case, the evident enjoyment of children under 10 seeing the play for the first time was wondrous to behold. “Mummy, I loved it!” I heard one eight-year-old girl declare.
Playwright (adapted from) William Shakespeare
Director: Toby Hulse
Cast: Marton Bassindale, Daisy Ann Feltcher, Fintan Hayeck, Lara Grace Ilori, Andy Umerah, Dewi Wykes
Duration: 90 minutes
Until: 27 September 2025