The end of summer time, marked by the putting back of clocks, is an especially evocative moment for a new production of Shakespeare's magical tale. Balmy days and nights, the sun's kiss on your skin, the sense of renewal that summer brings - all this seems but the stuff of wild dreams on a windy, chill night in the Gorbals.
For A Midsummer Night's Dream to work, you need three things: a good Bottom, a fine Puck and a convincing sense of an alternative nocturnal world of magical fantasy. Giles Havergal's production has each of these, the latter created with an impressive lightness of touch. Where weaker versions of the play go overboard and over-budget to mark the chasm between the worlds of drab, harsh day and fantastical night, Havergal merely whispers the slippage between the two.
The conscious world of daylight is given a modern setting, with the cast dressed in dark clothes and meeting in a vast, grey, characterless space. To make it feel especially contemporary, even the style of acting is pared down, unadorned. Helena, for example, played by Lesley Hart, is kooky and awkward, a steal from the Friends and Ally McBeal school of women.
Havergal marks the transition into the subliminal world of magic only by the suspension of some wooden chairs in mid-air, flooded in apple green and metallic pink light. It is a surreal image suggesting that the conventional world has been turned upside down. With Shakespeare's language and such strong performances from the whole cast, you need very little else to begin to dream. It comes as a late bonus, then, that the star of this production is the play-within-a-play, performed for the trio of newly married couples at the end. It's here that the richness of the production, its delicate tapping into a world of magic, pays off. You leave the theatre with is a nagging sense of other ways of being, and a dreamy tingle when you consider what the "faery time" of sleep might bring in a few hours' time. In a cruel, cold, urban landscape, this takes some doing.
·Until 17 November. Box office: 0141 429 0022.
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