It takes imagination to make Shakespeare’s most famous comedy feel fresh, but Dominic Hill’s excellent production creates an edgy excitement usually missing from the familiar tale.
The mood shift is most obvious in the transformation of the forest, where the four would-be lovers escape into a dark place — far darker than you’d expect from a story often played for laughs.
What Hill cuts out on the hilarity front, he makes up for in the psychological depth and nightmarish atmosphere he brings to the stage. Instead of being sweet and silly, this version is ambivalent and troubling.
For Hill, the night in the forest represents a Freudian kind of dream in which repressed impulses — be they violent or sexual — are set loose. When the two couples, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, wake up in harmony at the end of the play, it is with a puzzled and alarmed memory of the night’s dreamy activity.
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Did Emily Winter’s Helena really throw herself lewdly on top of Keith Fleming’s prostrate Demetrius? Did Demetrius sexually assault her in return? Did she then push Cameron Mowat’s Lysander into the trench of water where she herself had already been soaked? And was Kim Gerard’s well-brought-up Hermia the one who kneed Demetrius in the groin before launching a vicious attack on Helena? On the surface, all of these characters are attractive and loveable. Yet the combination of fairy magic and raw human desire pushes them into cruel behaviour that would be shaming in any other circumstances. The pay-off is an uncommonly satisfying sense of catharsis when finally, after so much disharmony, the couples’ pairings are resolved.
Just out of college and making a welcome debut with the company, Mowat and Gerard prove able foils to the always impressive Fleming and Winter.
The romantic sheen has even been knocked off the fairy world. Irene MacDougall, as the fairy queen Titania, trundles onto the stage with a pram that looks as though it has survived a bomb blast. The bed she lies on could have done service in the last war. Her entourage of twitching fairies in their ragged clothes and mud-streaked faces could be refugees. Okon Ubanga-Jones is a big, towering presence as Oberon, but there is nothing regal about his dress.
As he and Kevin Lennon’s spider-like Puck shadow the human characters, they are as much unwelcome memories of pain and displacement as they are carefree sprites.
Likewise the set by Naomi Wilkinson, atmospherically lit by Bruno Poet, carries the suggestion of destruction and decay. An off-centre stage of sloping planks seeming to stretch further from us than is physically possible, it is fronted by rocks and rubble as if it were some bomb-blasted theatre in a war-torn land.
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This unadorned setting is a constant reminder of real life: a place for the imagination but not for whimsy. Nature in Hill’s vision is no less austere. From the moment the mechanicals enter with their brollies and wet coats, we know we’re in for an inclement night.
Rain pours down from above and the roar of thunder interrupts the baritone rumble of spooky forest noises. The fairies use the water in the trench that cuts across the stage to cleanse themselves, but for the young lovers, most of whom get a dunking, it adds to the night’s indignity.
Without a weak link in the acting, it’s a production that makes us see the play afresh, drawing us down into Shakespeare’s watery depths and rewarding us when finally we come up for air.