A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first Shakespeare play the 12-year-old Ipswich schoolboy Trevor Nunn saw. In the 64 years since then, he has directed every other play in the canon (as well as internationally successful musicals, including Cats and Les Misérables). This, though, back in his home town, is his first Dream. Has it been worth the wait? Yes – with caveats.
Nunn’s stagecraft is magnificent. It is rooted in the language of the play. His actors, melding word to flesh, make us believe in their characters’ impossibly lyrical, grotesque or otherworldly experiences in the fairy-filled woods at night, as well as in their daylight selves in the ordered world of the court. They do this even though (here come the caveats) aspects of the concept and design distract, at times, from the action.
In shifting the setting from Athens to the British Raj in India in the 1930s, Nunn (who was criticised last year for mounting an all-white production of The Wars of the Roses) introduces a political element to the lovers’ choices not present in the play. Hermia and her father, Egeus, are Indian, as is Demetrius, the man Egeus has chosen to wed his daughter. Hermia’s own choice, Lysander, is one of the colonial occupiers. Egeus’s demand – irrational in its Athenian context – could, here, have a plausible, anticolonial rationale. Dramatically, this diminishes the impact of Egeus’s threat of the death penalty if Hermia disobeys him as it seems improbable that this would be upheld by the colonial power in the person of Matt Rawle’s measured, urbane, ironical Theseus.
In the programme, which I read after seeing the show, Nunn makes it clear that, for him, Egeus’s demand resonates with the notion of “honour killings”. For me, however, not making this association, the choice of place and time sets up resonances of conflict that are relevant to the Raj but not to the play or to the production, which ignores them.
Rawle doubles as the fairy king, Oberon. His acting is finely judged, but his costume of cape over bare chest, coupled with the combination of chiselled cheeks, jaw and ’tache give him a look of Freddie Mercury. His estranged queen, Titania (Fiona Hampton, also doubling as Hippolyta), in sheath gown of sizzling orange, and both their bands of fluorescent, body-painted fairies look like something from a 1970s episode of Star Trek. Libby Watson’s costumes produce distracting cross-references, but her set transforms magically from scalloped-marbled hall to moon-beamed wood (aided by Mark Jonathan’s lighting). Sound (designed by Drew Baumohl) and music (composed by Sarva Sabri) subtly underpin atmospheres of place and emotion.
In nitty-gritties of staging, this is a dream production: scenes flow dynamically, relationships build satisfyingly (between stage and auditorium as well as among characters). Every performance fits snugly within the overall: Harry Lister Smith and Assad Zaman as the boyishly romantic, jealous lovers courting Neerja Naik’s Hermia, flashing between demure and ferocious; and Imogen Daines’s Helena, dry as the Martinis she glugs. Esh Alladi’s almost animal Puck links Hampton’s ethereal Titania to Bottom the Weaver with his ass’s head (earthy, hilarious Kulvinder Ghir).
The play-within-a-play ending is particularly tender and humane (the Rude Mechanicals avoiding temptations to stray from comedy to knockabout) – like so much in this production, it manipulates shifting planes of reality and imagination to pleasing effect.
