Mud sticks. The most immediately striking feature of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the rucked-up wet earth that covers the stage. Anastasia Hille’s nervy Hippolyta has to totter across it in high heels; Leo Bill’s thoroughly shaken Bottom crawls around it on all fours in desperate search of his former non-ass-headed self. For the Athenian lovers, it is a wrestling arena in which they grapple and splat and become besmirched.
Johannes Schütz’s design takes its cue from Titania’s transfixing lament about the destitution of her realm. Crops are rotting; fogs are toxic; voices are rancorous. Hill-Gibbins has a strong record in projecting the disturbing imagery of Shakespeare’s plays: for Measure for Measure two years ago he filled the Young Vic stage with pneumatic sex dolls. He is right to register the darkness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The drama is fuelled – just as much as Othello – by jealousy. Its chronicle of climate-change horrors – physical, political, psychological – should be reproduced on Green Party literature. Its forebodings are searching because they are so intricate: lit up by shafts of silver.
Not in this version: forceful, substantially cut and monochrome. Lloyd Hutchinson is a slobbish Puck, who ambles off in a vest to put his girdle round the earth. Michael Gould’s Theseus is a shrill bully. Lysander’s fixation on Hermia comes near to rape. Melanie Pappenheim wanders through the action as a fairy, moving sinuously, singing her lines ethereally, memorably – but seeming to have strayed from some adjacent parody. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact,” Theseus proclaims. Hill-Gibbins delivers a third of the play: much lunacy but too little of poetry or love.
