BWW Reviews: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Broadway Theatre Studio, Catford, February 2 2011

Gameshow take their brand of collaborative theatre to spaces (indoors and outdoors) which one wouldn't always associate with theatre, knowing that a play's magic lies the interconnectedness of the text, the staging, the acting and the audience. While The Broadway Theatre's Main Stage features crowdpleasing musical nostalgia and comedy, the Studio concentrates on more orthodox theatre and offers an intimate environment in which Gameshow's four actors get to work.

With the play stripped back to the mischief wrought by Oberon and Puck on Titania, Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander, there's plenty of laughs in the mismatch between Titania's ardent confession of love and its object, the artless, asinine Bottom (though older members of the audience may be reminded less of a donkey and more of Les Dawson's politically incorrect Cosmo Smallpiece character) and also in Demetrius' and Lysander's bewitched pursuit of a disbelieving, ever-more indignant Helena. In keeping with Gameshow's ethos, there's some improvised explanation for the audience of how the four actors will cover the parts and of the "two for the price of one" extra play bolted on to the end of the main event - Pyramus' farcical pursuit of Thisbe.

Seeing the play on the first night, there is plenty of time for the young cast to tighten up the improvisation and shorten the breaks in the main drama as the run progresses: they may also wish to reconsider the wisdom of playing Pyramus in a South London street patois accent - the play within a play may be staged for laughs in its incompetence, but this aspect feels rather too forced for my taste. On the other hand, James Utechin is excellent as Oberon, directing Puck from a podium via a microphone and oozing mischievous authority; Gabriella Best does Helena's half-hoping, half-disbelieving, fully angry reaction to her new-found desirability very well; and Sarah Carver is a manipulative Puck, as eager as his king to exercise power over the love lives of his innocent targets. Louie McKenna may not be Denzel Washington (as he claims to the audience twice before the action starts, already a comic ass before acting Bottom's part), but he connects most directly with the audience and has a physical presence that can fill the small, often bare, stage.

With the actors not much older than a group of teenagers keen on voting for the casting of Pyramus and Thisbe in one of the breaks, Matthew Evans' production is most likely to appeal to GCSE and A level students studying one of Shakespeare's most accessible plays. But South Londoners of all ages, possibly wary of the grandeur of an RSC production and the opacity of 16th language in 21st century ears, will appreciate Gameshow's willingness to bring the play to life in a way that makes sense right here, right now.

 

A Midsummer Night's Dream is at The Broadway Studio, Catford until 27 February 2011   

 

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