Reviews

[Ed:] This is quite possibly one of the daftest, funniest theatre reviews ever carried by a national publication. Written by drag-queen Sasha Selavie under the heading “Arts Bitching”.

Brazil may swarm with third-sex tarts, but it’s got nothing on Shakespeare! What was this guy’s libido coming from? Well, nowhere you’d recognise, darling! Someplace far from the mundanities of Planet Earth, cut loose from the tedious need to make sex-urges separtist life-styles, Our Shakie still flips punter’s wigs! Taking his cue from Elizabethan England - a society in fabulous flux! - Shakie tossed every element going into his gorgeously poetic bonce. Inspired by a chalk-faced, red-wigged Queen - Liz the First, a kind of Lily Savage with balls - Shakie embraced English Fairies.The result? A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a sleek sexual farce bubbling with dark magic, like Rent rewritten as A Company of Wolves! This play, of course was made to be staged outside, and a suitably ruined, ivy-strewn set isolates Shakie’s doings from the 20th Century and makes them brilliantly timeless. As theatre, this is Vivienne Westwood meets Willie Burroughs - the past viewed as lush, raw material and cut-up every which way. Sure, it’s a volatile, unpredictable method, but in this case, it’s worked. What do we get? Mincing Edwardian drag and fairies in dance-studio Lycra! Like raw steak ice-cream, the idea might curl toes but the reality is charmingly eccentric! So what happens? Four yuppies do the wood at night and get spiked with mystic Viagra! The source? Down-market slacker Puck (Robert Hands), up for serious mischief. See, Fairy King Oberon (Daniel Flynn) - a misogynist Nancy in a troubled marriage - has the hots for a human boy, and wants Wifey Titania out the way. Problem is, she’s a Fairy Queen, so needs heavy distraction! But Rohypnol’s scarce, barbiturates leave traces, and the NHS don’t do Viagra. So Puck grabs a black-market, organic substitute, and drips it on Queenie (Nicola Duffett). The effect? Instant Bestiality! Queenie humps a workman magically given an ass’s head! But then, she’s understandably frustrated. All blonde, tumbling barrel-curls and optional whip, with a smoking husk of a voice that Jessica Rabbit would kill for, she’s wasted on yobby Oberon! But if the real passion’s kept strictly supernatural, our four, Supercilious Snobs do what humans do best - love-struck slapstick. Lysander (Damien Matthews) is an effete, fin de siecle poet, cursed with floppy, Hugh Grant hair and negative charisma.Together with main squeeze Hermia (Rebecca Johnson) he’s the limp,Walt Disney mayo on tonight’s lusty hettie hot dogs! Meet Demetrius (Timothy Watson) a drop-dead hunk in gleaming cavalry boots and hair-gel! Sure, he previously panted for Hermia, but Puck’s nifty love-drug makes Demmy drool for Helena! (Helen Grace). Like the mouthful formerly known as Prince, circa 1988, she’s totally peach from head to toe, with a bosom verging on the prehensile! Now - all Puck’d out - this feisty nympho wants wimpy, uninterested Lysander. What a come-down - minutes before, she’d played doggy to Demetrius, fetching his sword and begging on all fours!
Meanwhile, Sub-Plot 2 - the Rude Mechanicals - is broad, low comedy of the Nora Batty school. Six naff labourers get lost, get magic’d, and give a crappy play for Royalty. Don’t despair - if lame on the page, brilliant comic timing makes these scenes sparkle like Graham Norton on E! But thank Jesus, and all The Heavenly Saints for sharp acting - Shakie’s idea of comedy is truly bizarre, heavy-handed innuendoes numbingly repeated! A tight edit would have done Our Will wonders, but one suspects he was paid by the word! Still - even with the bog-standard framing sequence - Will’s poetry remains a matchless, breath-taking joy. And when fluidly directed like this, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream is as magic as the first draft wet from Will’s quill! Do yourselves a favour - go to Adult Literacy Class! One day, you’ll drop Smash Hits and tackle Shakie, but till then, watch him! This production is a fabulous place to start!

So successful was Rachel Kavanaugh’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream last year that the open-air theatre in Regent’s Park has revived it this summer. It has certainly worn well, and even improves with a second viewing. It still has the freshness, pace and clarity that made it so appealing last year, but it has also gained a little in depth, so that the play’s darker psychological dimension is more keenly felt.

It remains as pretty as ever, with Kavanaugh and her designer, David Knapman, making wonderful use of the outdoor space. The set is a ruined bower, dripping with ivy and flanked by tumbling columns and tipsy cupids. It works as well for Theseus’s palace as for the woods, and blends with the nodding treetops of the park. Kavanaugh employs the whole of the space ingeniously: the fairies suddenly materialise in the foliage and the treetops; the lovers pursue each other across the lawns or shove each other into bushes.

The contrast between the mortal and the fairy world is neatly pointed up. The lovers are clad as Victorian figures on a biscuit box - the women in frills, flounces, bustles and bonnets, which emphasises their prettified, rather shallow grasp of love and desire, while the fairies look more like characters from a Victorian circus, suggesting a darker, more fantastical mindset. This scheme allows the moral restrictions and oppression of Athens to contrast clearly with the amorality and anarchy of the fairy world and the unsettling emotions that overtake the lovers. Indeed, as the mortals’ desires become unbuttoned, so to do their clothes, until they are stripped down to pantaloons and petticoats.

The lovers themselves manage to be both comical and poignant. Helen Grace’s Helena and Rebecca Johnson’s Hermia are nicely contrasted, and the two men Damien Matthews as Lysander and Timothy Watson as Demetrius, are particularly funny. Yet when they awake, still groggy from their “dream”, the sinister aspects of their behaviour hang in the air. Daniel Flynn’s Oberon too lets us see his wrath, but also his unease at realising how shallow his victory over Titania has been.

In the end, though, it is a production that thrives on comic detail. As the fairies sing Titania to sleep they rock her between them; as they conduct her away for her night of bliss with Bottom they huddle together to create an ass. Puck, soothing the lovers to sleep, paves the path of one with cushions and lassos another with a handy length of vine. The mechanicals are genuinely funny and precisely drawn. Ian Talbot gives an irresistibly bumptious Bottom, while Christopher Godwin as the dapper tailor takes out a little needlework while waiting for his cue.

While the production is excellent at this sort of detail, some of the verse-speaking is not so hot, performers tending to favour audibility over intonation and interpretation. But all in all, this is a bright, breezy and funny Dream , topped by a lovely performance from Robert Hands as Puck, who is impish and appealing without trying to steal the show.

If you’re looking for an alfresco play to amble along to on a warm evening, this staging of Shakespeare’s Dream is very enjoyable. The Open Air Theatre, with its rustling trees, makes an ideal setting for runaway lovers lost in a magical fairy wood.
Rachel Kavanaugh’s production - which transports Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his exotic bride Hippolyta (Michael Elwyn and Debby Bishop) to the colonial Victorian era - deserves this revival after its success last year. Her strong cast are clearly enjoying themselves.
Bottom as portrayed by Ian Talbot is a small, earthy but excitable Yorkshireman who gets petulantly queeny when Peter Quince (John Griffiths) won’t let him play every role in their am-dram rehearsals. Metamorphosed into an ass, Talbot sports a splendid full mask, complete with blinking eyes and equine twitches.
The Mechanicals are also delightfully funny as a team, making a complete pig’s ear of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Memorably, as our mock hero bombastically breathes his last, Moon’s dog (a mop-head, panting on the end of a stick) keeps mounting the tragedian’s shin.
However, this is not a psychologically penetrating production of the Dream, and some of the acting lacks subtlety. Robert Hands’s Puck clumps about in gipsy rags and Doc Martens, offering a clumsy imitation of a brat. David Knapman’s set is unfussy - marble ruins overgrown with ivy - but some of the costumes are chocolate-boxy.
Ultimately, the forest is fairly tame. No one goes truly wild or gets deeply bruised in this realm of night fantasies and partner-swopping. Still, for a family show, Kavanaugh’s production is sexually frisky. Nicola Duffett’s husky Titania has a passionate temper and one moment of seriously frantic distress when she sees the monster that Oberon has made her love. Daniel Flynn’s leonine King of the Fairies has a marked dark side, jealousy poisoning his description of Titania’ s pretty bower.
The physicality of this show is its forte, especially when it accelerates into slapstick. The young lovers are terrifically animated and tightly drilled. Rebecca Johnson’s Hermia clings to Damien Matthews’s Lysander like a Velcro monkey. He and Timothy Watson’s Demetrius scurry after her best friend Helena on their knees, in synch. And, as the infuriated Helena, Helen Grace lays out her unwanted admirers with an elegant boot in the groin.