BWW Reviews: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Rose Theatre Kingston, September 5 2014

That Ol' Shakey's works are so often interpreted, updated or adapted is fine with me - they're big enough to stand up for themselves and sufficiently versatile to slide in and out of genres unscathed. But it's nice once in a while to see a play done as straight as one can these days - Elizabethan dress, no body mics and with period musical intsruments (that always look like they've been recovered from the recycling bin). That's what we get from the Globe Theatre on tour, who are giving us their 2013 A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Rose Theatre Kingston (until September 7) and Aylesbury Waterside Theatre (September 10-14) before heading off to China and Russia.

What fun lies in store for those audiences! As the three worlds (fairy, court and stage) collide and lovers are rent asunder and subsequently reconciled, the laughs keep coming - as does the wit and wisdom. Aden Gillett's Fairy King Oberon is as, er..., puckishly contrary as his servant, Puck (the mischievous Molly Logan), wryly amused by the chaos his love potion causes amongst the Athenians. Jamie Chandler and Philip Correia make a noble and handsome pair, but are at their best when devilishly grinning through the fourth wall as they interpolate themselves between Lizzy Watts' feisty Hermia and Beatriz Romilly's poetic Helena, bewitched, brawling and bewitching.

Janie Dee has a lot of fun with Queen Titania, especially when under Oberon's spell and lustfully pursuing Nick Bottom's Ass. She may choose to summon her fairy helpers to assist with her seduction of the transformed weaver, but, with a dancer's lightness of foot and a look in the eye that needed no prompting from magic flower juice, I don't think she needs much help with that objective.

And if some seasoned Shakespeare fans may quail at the prospect of another round of slapstick from the rude mechanicals, the hapless band are still great crowdpleasers. In an inevitably disastrous Pyramus and Thisbe, Brendan O'Hea's camp Quince can barely contain his amorous intentions towards Steffan Donnelly's elongated Thisbe in a fright wig. As the makeshift stage (amusingly, it's a mini-version of the Globe stage - itself the model for the set as a whole) collapses with the plot, well-meaning Snug the joiner does his bit by hammering down new floorboards - to Peter Quince's horror. Meanwhile, Trevor Fox's big, bustling Bottom is requesting prompts (in the same broad Geordie accent in which he has demanded to play all the parts) and hamming it up beyond measure as the play within a play shambles to its conclusion. You know what's coming the moment the happy lovers sit down to watch the entertainment, but it's funnier every time!

And I suppose that's true of the play itself. Sexy, funny and spectacular, a feast for eyes and intellect, there's a reason it's been around for 400 years and, if the conflicts of the real world can be resolved as neatly as those in Shakespeare's imagined worlds, it'll still be around 400 years from now.

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