A Midsummer Night’s Dream Review – Royal rockers and a legendary folk band stir up trouble | stage

TThe magic is in the music in Atri Banerjee’s production of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy. “Rock ‘n’ roll, you can’t beat it,” one character says, and it sounds like party theater in some of the intermission moments when the fairies and Athenians grab a handheld microphone for a musical number.

The beautiful folk tunes that accompany the drama – and sometimes bring it to a complete halt – are composed by Maimuna Mimoun. Titania’s fantasy crew is a fantastic four-piece group, who variously play electric guitar, violin, keyboard and other instruments. Theseus is a rock star. And so is Puck.

There is much to admire in the sound design of Max Pappenheim, whose songbirds merge with those of the garden, while Naomi Dawson’s set opens into the world of the forest, with open doors leading from the artificial to the real. There is a sign that says “This Green Plot” and there is a changing room in the background.

The series feels somewhat less fluid in its conjoined stories of the wedding of Hippolyta (Jenny Rainsford) and Theseus (Olivier Huband) and the dispute between the Fairy King and Queen Oberon (also Huband) and Titania (also Rainsford), along with the antics of runaway lovers who cross paths in the woods and the comedy of the robots.

There is freshness and humour, particularly through Bottom (Nadeem Islam) – who is deaf and brings sign language and great physical comedy. But some innovations seem to be borrowed from the Jimmy Lloyd school. The group’s staircases may differentiate between the Athenian, human, and imaginary worlds, and emphasize their gradations of power, but they also seem to derive from the terraces at Lloyd’s Evita.

The characters and costumes have a similarly endearing look with cool modern clothes interspersed with retro spots (ruffles on shirt fronts, puffball skirts). Their modern-day sarcastic asides (“I see you,” “Be quiet”) are not self-contradictory, playing into a sense of parallel time (representing the now and the blurred other past world), but some of the beauty of poetry is muffled in the actors’ mouths. The wisdom about love and illusion is all there faithfully (“Love sees not with the eyes, but with the mind”), but it floats without any fixation.

The doubling up of the royal couples isn’t distinctive enough, and the chemistry between Theseus and Hippolyta is unconvincing. Other couples do better: Hermia (Haftoo Kassim) is the rebellious daughter who escapes into these woods with her lover, Lysander (Missia Butler). Helena (Mary Mallon) is a standout, with some wonderfully tortured comedy derived from her unrequited love for Demetrius (Tyric Jarrett). Puck (Georgia Bruce) not only pours “idle love” into the couples’ eyes, but also sings and jokes, becoming a kind of party competition in spirit.

The world of robots brings great tickling fun; Every character here is likable and entertaining. However, the pace slows down to the point that their playing performance is very long and laborious. So a production that is dreamy in its look and sound but you don’t feel like you’ve fully entered into its magic.