A Midsummer Night's Dream review, Open Air Theatre

Caravan of love

Matthew Dunster's Big Fat Gypsy take on the Bard's classic tale of midsummer mischief is a blur of fisticuffs and hoop earrings, outcry and outrage. Setting the action in a modern, vampy, trampy Athens where people live in caravans has other resonances too, but any attempt to put an intellectual form on this setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream is to miss the point. It is about mayhem visited on a community for which mayhem is its life force.

The story is simple in its complexity. Hermia and Lysander are in love, but Daddy insists she marries Demetrius. Helena loves Demetrius. His interest in Hermia's driving her crazy. Theseus is marrying Hippolyta. He gets heavy with Hermia and tells her to obey her father. The lovers run away; whereupon they're mistakenly enchanted by the bad fairy, Puck. Meanwhile Puck's boss's wife, the fairy queen, Titania, is in love with an ass. That was the one set of orders he got right...

The drumbeat through Dream, are the rude mechanicals, the horny handed sons of toil entrusted with  the entertainment at the nuptials. They're rehearsing Piramus and Thisbe starring Nick Bottom the weaver - he who turns into an ass.  In this production the performance is a mash up of classic English tunes and a few classics - a bit like Beethoven meets Kit and the Widow. It's a highly original interpretation of a scene that is difficult to make your own when every A List director has already been let loose on it. The cast is fit and gorgeous and Rebecca Oldfield as a hilarious, teetering, Helena is particularly striking.

In conclusion: Jon Bauster's imaginative set has the gipsy boys at work building roads before heading down to the caravan park. With a few tweaks, and the help of a crane, the stage morphs into a flowery bower with a little pool. Enchanting.

References:

Fiona Mountford review in The Evening Standard
Open Air Theatre, tickets