So you thought that William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream? Wrong. At least, wrong according to Sally Llewellyn's playful drama, which has nobleman Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, penning the play as a wedding present for the daughter he has rejected and neglected.
Llewellyn's play owes more to the romantic speculations of the film Shakespeare in Love than it does to a scholarly analysis of the vexed question of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. However, this hardly matters - although you do wish that this script showed half the intelligence and wit of Tom Stoppard's screenplay.
Essentially, what is on offer here is a love story dressed up with a few facts and plenty of fiction, as Edward de Vere - "the most celebrated poet in England" - falls in love with Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, generally accepted to be the object of affection in Shakespeare's sonnets. Soon De Vere and Wriothesley are involved in a love triangle, which leads De Vere to understand the true madness of love, so allowing him to write the Dream.
All very neat, and you certainly don't have to buy the thesis to enjoy the yarn. The most entertaining touch is the portrayal of Shakespeare as a minor character in the drama, a money- grubbing Warwickshire yokel who takes great delight in taking a blue pencil to De Vere's script. Which is exactly what Llewellyn's script needs, too. This is a writer who seems to have graduated from the Robert Bolt school of period-costume drama: the evening is a mix of the turgid, the faintly comic and the ridiculously respectable.
There are signs that Llewellyn wants to be more daring. But a device that has a fairy from the Dream invading De Vere's world never takes flight in a dull production that is insistently earthbound, lacking the magical excitement and madness of real creativity or, come to that, love.
· Until January 24. Box office: 020-7261 9876.
