So what's the big deal about another summer production of Shakespeare's moonwashed comedy? Actually, it's a very big deal - possibly the biggest deal clinched by regional theatre since the big civic playhouses sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s. Of the extra £25m of investment made available by the Arts Council, £20,000 filtered through to Derby, enabling the Playhouse to increase its average cast size from three to 13 and present its first Shakespeare for nine years.
With an audience so long out of the theatre-going habit, the recipients of the grant are under an obligation to come up with something good - so it's a pleasure to report that the Playhouse's artistic director, Karen Louise Hebden, has delivered not just a respectable Dream but an outstanding one.
There are plenty of productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream where one might praise the intelligence of the staging, the quality of the verse-speaking and the nimbleness of the ensemble playing. Hebden has all of these bases covered, but she adds that indefinable ingredient that this play requires more than anything else: a touch of magic.
The supernatural elements are so beguiling - I've never heard an audience gasp so loudly and so often - that it would be criminal to give them away. Suffice it to say that Hebden's production truly takes flight at about the same time Puck does.
Every performance here deserves commendation, but among the highlights, Paul Ewing provides the most pliable Puck in recent memory. Conor Moloney's bumptious, Irish Bottom plays fast and loose with the text at times (try looking up "feckin' eejits" in a concordance to Shakespeare), but has just enough charm to get away with it.
Perhaps the most heartening aspect of the evening, however, was the fact that the auditorium was full of family groups having a great time. If these are the standards a reinvigorated regional theatre can achieve, then this has to be the best £25m the Arts Council ever spent.
· Until July 3. Box office: 01332 363275.
