A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Barbican

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Ron Daniels’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has come to the Barbican, with all the delights of its Victorian-theatre setting preserved, indeed positively enhanced by the modernity surrounding it. They play begins downbeat, with Mike Gwilym’s Theseus remarkably low-spirited a the idea of his coming marriage. It takes the entire evening for him to cheer up; in the interim we have seen him, in his other persona as Oberon, transformed from jealous avenger to benevolent spirit. 

The play’s final promise of peace has rarely carried more weight; nor has Titania’s revolution when released from her spell ever been more strongly conveyed than it is here by Juliet Stevenson. The lovers have relaxed into routine caterwaulings, but the mechanicals are more real than ever. Geoffrey Hutching’s Bottom is obviously a very reliable man to whom to take your weaving; and his frightened singing when Titania first lights on him is a joy. So too is Anthony O’Donnell’s Snug. 

You remain in the same world when visiting Jean-Claude Grumberg’s Dreyfus (Hampstead). In a Polish village in 1930 an amateur group are rehearsing a play about France’s foulest hour of anti-Semitism under a writer-director (Tom Wilkinson) whose idealism suffers as many blows from his cast as did Peter Quince’s.

His senior actor (Gary Waldhorn) is a veritable Bottom for his omnivorous ambition, his Dreyfus (Alfred Molina) a Francis Flute for his bashfulness, hating both soldiers and the idea of playing one. Motel the tailor, (Jonathan Lynn) regards the occasion purely as an excuse for costume. 

We see their identities changing as they rehearse; Dreyfus becomes military indeed when faced with an incipient pogrom. This struck me as wishful thinking, just as the characters’ wholesale emigration in Germany and ‘freedom’ struck me as easy irony. M. Grumberg, on the evidence of this play and The Workshop, is a slight though well intentioned playwright. But he has a gift for group-humour, splendidly realised in Nancy Meckler’s production by crack cast, among whom Ben Warriss makes a late but welcome dramatic debut as an ancient caretaker.