Romantic Victorian versions of Shakespeare’s comedy are long vanished but few productions go as far as this new one by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Played at two hours without interval on a muddy stage, it mines the text to explore the darker regions of the collective unconscious. Even if our own seasonal disruption – Storm Doris – meant I missed the first few minutes, it offers an arresting vision of a play that can too easily lapse into harmless escapism.
Violence is never far away in this production. Lloyd Hutchinson’s Egeus raises a fist to his daughter’s unwanted wooer; Robin Starveling as Moonshine goes in hot pursuit of a condescending courtier, and a wonderfully burly Puck (Hutchinson doubling up) takes a sadistic delight in humiliating pesky mortals. But much of the focus is on the quartet of lovers who find that the wood releases primitive impulses and simmering hatreds that can never be erased. Back in Athens, Anna Madeley’s hypnotic Helena seems permanently traumatised by her torment, and although Jemima Rooper’s fiery Hermia clings to Lysander, you feel it is more from desperation than passion.
Laughter, until the end, is in short supply in a production in which the whole ensemble combines to evoke a fairy world characterised by Harvey Brough’s eerie melodies. Even the Pyramus-Thisbe scene, although amusingly done, perpetuates the idea of an unshakeable link between the play’s seemingly disparate worlds. Leo Bill’s manic Bottom is pantingly drawn to Anastasia Hille’s Hippolyta as if haunted by her previous incarnation as Titania.
Meanwhile, Michael Gould’s Theseus is reduced to impotent rage in payment for having earlier, as Oberon, opted to fill his beloved’s mind with “hateful fantasies”. I wouldn’t want to see every Dream played this way, but it is consistent, well acted and persuasively nightmarish. As the play-scene spirals into chaos, Oliver Alvin-Wilson as Demetrius reiterates his earlier line: “Are you sure that we are awake?” In exploring the thin division between daily reality and our darkest imaginings, that is the question disturbingly posed by this bracing production.
- At the Young Vic, London, until 1 April. Box office: 020-7922 2922.
