Nick Bagnall is developing a reputation as the most mind-altering of Shakespearean directors. Last year, he delivered a delightfully lysergic A Midsummer Night’s Dream set waist-deep in a sea of screwed-up paper; now, in association with Shakespeare’s Globe, he has produced a version of this early comedy that is, in every sense, a trip.
Bagnall takes the pop culture of the 1960s as his starting point; and though the curved rostra of Katie Sykes’ design become an irresistible temptation to go-go dancers, James Fortune’s score is a reminder that not everything from the era was solid gold. Stuffy old Verona is presented as an easy-listening hell of chaperoned dances, from which the two young gents escape to the mod mecca of Milan. Beyond that lies a band of outlaws who are indeed a band called the Outlaws, living in a counter-cultural haze of alternative lifestyles, loud drums and indulgent guitar solos.
If the high-decibel content has a slight tendency to overwhelm the poetry, the swinging milieu does help to solve the problem of the play’s notoriously casual attitude towards fidelity. The tactile frisson between Dharmesh Patel’s Proteus and Guy Hughes’s Valentine suggests they are rather more intimately involved with each other than either Aruhan Galieva’s sensual Silvia or Leah Brotherhead’s resourceful Julia. But even if the play does not approach the emotional richness of Shakespeare’s later comedies, it lends itself quite nicely to a groovy kind of love.
• At Liverpool Everyman until 29 October. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
