How do you freshen up a play which is revived almost every summer at Shakespeare’s Globe? Do it in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in the middle of winter. Directors Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hayat turn what is usually a summery froth of fairies and lovers into a crisp and frosty fairytale, a kind of sexed-up Narnia, twisting a Grimm story out of one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays.
Sergo Vares’s Puck sets the tone: in a black tutu and white face make up he stares down the audience as he slowly eats a banana. It’s creepy. There’s a gleaming white set, where a white banquet table is laid for a banquet by staff in black and white livery. These servants - executive chef Nick Bottom, head butler Peter Quince - become the Rude Mechanicals, as Roughan lightly picks up on the class divide between the poor actors and the noble lovers who deride them.
It’s a smart adaptation of a very familiar play, equal parts magical and unsettling, with the dark edge that all fairytales contain and - with everyone in scarves and thick coats - a wintry chill. When we enter fairy land, there’s no lush forest but a snowing winterscape consisting of just a black piano on a shiny white floor. Strains of Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells are distorted out of tune. While the four mortal lovers Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia and Helena look like they’ve stepped out of a Boden winter catalogue - beige knitwear, long coats - the fairies are in black tutus and white tights.
Roughan digs into the intimacy of the play, making the four lovers really horny, with characters sometimes delivering lines just millimetres from each other’s faces. And she hasn’t been afraid to make the play suit her unsettling ends. Robin Starveling, usually the most mocked of the Rude Mechanicals, doesn’t exist here; instead Puck takes his place, contorting on and offstage like the Emcee from Cabaret, sowing a malevolent chaos as he insinuates himself into the amateur acting troupe. Vares is a transfixing Puck, whose pained eyes stare through his smeared white make up as he does the bidding of his fairy master. Again, creepy.
That fairy master, as played by Michael Marcus (who doubles as Theseus), is king of the creeps, a pathetic tyrant desperate to steal Titania’s ‘changeling’ child. In this production which revels in reverses, the changeling is not a boy but a girl, played by Pria Kalsi and dressed like red riding hood, one of the most famous characters to get lost in the woods. There are more reversed expectations in the wonderful scene of Bottom’s transformation into a donkey, which has everyone onstage wear donkey masks except Bottom himself. Danny Kirrane is a highlight as the executive chef turned have-a-go actor, earnest but not overplaying the comedy.
Indeed, though there is comedy here - Tara Tijani’s sassy Helena, who scraps hilariously with her friend-turned-love-rival Hermia (Tiwa Lade) - Roughan keeps a lid on it. That’s especially evident in the striking final scenes: usually a place for riotous comedy and hilariously bad acting, here the laughs from the Rude Mechanicals’s performance are muted, a strange tension in the air, until that pristine white set…doesn’t stay so white.
It’s an odd ending, a violent shock, suggesting that maybe we were better off in the fairy world of spells and donkey heads rather than the one of capricious tyrants. That climax may not be for everyone, but the ride to reach it is wonderful, as Roughan rids the play of any trace of hazy summer, and turns it instead into a deeply unsettling winter’s tale.
To 31 Jan 2026
