I feel in two minds about this new West End Dream. Dawn French, though a big draw, is not the greatest Bottom I've seen. And Matthew Francis's chosen setting of a 1940s manor house is whimsically odd. But if the play teaches us anything, it is to exercise charity, and by the end I felt Shakespeare had just about managed to win through.
What strikes you about the setting is that it makes total nonsense of the opening scenes. Why should these rural denizens be invoking "the ancient privilege of Athens"? And few Sussex girls, I suspect, were threatened with death, as Hermia is, for failing to marry their father's choice. The setting also undermines the testy relationship of Jemma Redgrave's captive Hippolyta to Michael Siberry's Theseus, which is later echoed by their antagonism in the roles of Titania and Oberon.
Updating Shakespeare is neither good nor bad: it all depends on the use made of it. Here the anachronisms outweigh the advantages until one gets to the wood, where the period setting becomes irrelevant. And it is the quartet of lovers who give this production its vital energy. Their great quarrel scene is wonderfully played, with Gillian Kearney's vixenish Hermia doubling the wounded spite of Tilly Blackwood's muddied Helena and hurling Will Keen's scornful Lysander to the ground.
But it is Dawn French's Bottom people will come to see and she strikes me as no more than mildly funny. The main joke is that she is translated not merely into an ass but one with a furry male appendage. It gives her the chance to find unsuspected double entendres but robs her transition back to human form of its magic. The point is that Bottom has been entangled in a dream, not that a woman has found herself sporting an ass's member.
For me the production misses the play's transfigurative strangeness. It is typical that Theseus's great speech on imagination is upstaged by the rearrangement of the furniture in his oddly restored house. In place of strangeness, we get high spirits. The Pyramus-Thisbe scene is nicely done - I particularly liked Debbie Chazen's revolving wall - and it is capped by an invigorating dance to a Benny Goodman swing number. But in a truly great Dream, as opposed to a merely pleasant one, you should feel the characters have emerged from chaos into a self-realising state of liberated concord.
Until May 12. Box office: 020-7369 1740. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
