“Potent enchantment”
REVIEWS MAY 23, 2023 BY SAM MARLOWESHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE, LONDON
Fresh production of the Shakespearean summer favourite delivers a magical mix of darkness and moonshine
Every summer brings its fair share of Dreams, so productions that feel fresh can seem as rare as fairy dust. This one, directed by Elle While, has a sprinkling of just that transformative magic. It confronts the sinister, more ugly aspects of a play often regarded as Shakespeare’s prettiest of comedies, without overburdening the text with concept or leaching it of its laughs. And it boasts some delicious performances that lend new colours to the familiar in a way that consistently, yet subtly, wrong-foots, provokes and delights.
It begins, on Wills’ design of creeping tree roots, with a whirling, ritualised dance in which the worlds of the wild woods and the Athenian court are swirled together – a frenzied terpsichorean fairy ring (movement is by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster) performed to a snarling cacophony of brass.
Springing from the ground beneath the dancers’ feet bursts Puck, played by the Globe’s artistic director Michelle Terry – a malign, twiggy spirit streaked in green and gold. Bawling like a fractious baby in creepy imitation of Titania and Oberon’s disputed Indian boy, this Puck is a creature less of dreams than of nightmares: Terry swaggers and teases, torments and disrupts, gurgling with relish over each piece of cruel and confounding mischief. It’s the kind of acting that brings out the best in this venue: eye-catching and crowd-pleasing, but crammed with revealing detail.
Happily, there’s similarly fine work from the rest of the cast, whose jewel-coloured costumes by takis are Elizabethan by way of the New Romantics. The ensemble includes trans actors and cross-gender casting, pointing up a fluidity around identity and sexuality; Mariah Gale’s hugely entertaining Bottom is explicitly feminised as Nicola (and, Hyacinth Bucket-like, this aspiring thesp prefers her surname pronounced “Bottome”). Transformed by Puck and Jack Laskey’s boyishly mischievous Oberon into a donkey, Gale canters and brays in a manner so helpless and deranged that it’s disturbingly uncanny. When she remarks, sliding down the body of Marianne Oldham’s bewitched Titania, “I could munch your good dry oats”, it briefly looks like an unorthodox prelude to cunnilingus.
Such quicksilver tonal switches ripple throughout While’s production. We’re made uncomfortably aware, in the sniggering machinations of Puck and Oberon, that their love potion is essentially floral Rohypnol. And the nastiness with which first Helena and then Hermia are rejected is a gut-punch, not least because of the ableist language: Francesca Mills, as a witty Hermia, has achondroplasia, and when Sam Crerar’s Lysander spits “get you gone, you dwarf”, the moment is horrifyingly electric.
Laughter, though, always follows swiftly on the heels of shock or gasp, and it’s all galvanised by a live-wire current of sensual appetite. Not every moment is slick, not every idea properly pursued. But this is potent enchantment, equal parts darkness and moonshine.
The Telegraph
4 stars out of 5
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: superlative folk horror (with a daft trigger warning)
The Globe’s fresh take on Shakespeare’s magical comedy is closer to a hallucinatory nightmare than a romantic romp
There is a chill wind rattling through this production. Not a literal one, thankfully; at least not on the night I attended, when the British weather actually deigned to match that “midsummer” brief. But Elle While’s striking folk-horror take on Shakespeare’s romantic romp is a much darker Dream – closer to a hallucinatory nightmare.
The Globe stage has been invaded by turquoise and gilt tentacles, slithering down the back wall and enveloping the columns. Even before the lovers escape into the forest, nature is coming for them. That malign power is personified by Michelle Terry’s memorably eerie Puck, face covered by a serial-killer mask with tufts of moss, twigs sprouting chaotically from her head and snaking out of her gloved hands like claws. This Puck takes malevolent glee in manipulating those around her (the character, like many here, is gender-swapped). In her opening scene, she torments an unlucky fairy, making her spasm, jerk and crash to the ground. It’s a riveting performance from the Globe’s artistic director, mercurial and otherworldly, from the mocking sing-song delivery to the eccentric, lewd jigs as she mimics these baffling “mortals”.
Magic is generally a sinister force. Funny as it is seeing Sam Crerar’s earnestly intense Lysander and Vinnie Heaven’s smarmy Demetrius switch their affections from Hermia to Helena in an instant, their inflamed passion feels dangerous – stoking not just love but violent possessiveness.
Likewise, Puck ensnares Titania to satisfy the petty vindictiveness of Oberon (a preening Jack Laskey), while Titania physically controls Bottom with her coercive magic. There’s an unsettling aftermath when all of these possessed characters wake, confused and violated, from their drugged state.
There’s also a real gut-punch of a lovers’ fight, thanks to the casting of the excellent Francesca Mills (who has the genetic disorder achondroplasia) as Hermia. There were audible gasps from the audience as she demanded of Helena, “How low am I?”, and particularly when Lysander spat the word “dwarf” at her. It makes the inclusion of “ableism” in the theatre’s overwrought trigger warnings seem particularly redundant; that language should, and does, viscerally shock.
There are also laughs in this comedy, nearly all coming from Mariah Gale’s hyper-intense thespian Bottom (or, per her mock-pretentious pronunciation, “Bot-TUME”). Once transformed, she produces an impeccable donkey trot and whinny. But I was unconvinced by takis’s hybrid costumes: Hermia’s Elizabethan gown split open to reveal shiny shorts and knee-high boots, or Oberon in a sparkly jumpsuit, looking more like a glam-rock Eurovision reject than a fairy king. There’s also too much shouting, flattening the poetry. But Terry’s diabolical Puck will definitely haunt my dreams.
Whats on Stage
4 stars out of 5
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe – review
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The casting of the ferocious Francesca Mills, an actor who has a form of dwarfism, as Hermia has given cause for the Globe to issue warnings over not just the sexist and misogynistic themes employed by Shakespeare, but also the ablest language used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Indeed, as insults are thrown at the lovelorn Hermia, calling her small and dwarfish and offering the oft quoted “though she is little, she is fierce”, it brings a startling new breadth and brutality to the text in Elle While’s spritely new production.
The spirited magic and the darkly comedic are given such air to breathe that this is a production that draws its audience in with a good natured but naughtily mischievous wink. While is canny enough to allow the comedy to reach heights of ridiculousness and knows exactly when to put the brakes on and pause for the quieter moments too. Even Mariah Gale’s particularly frisky Bottom has a beautifully tender moment as she observes that “man is but a patched fool”.
Metallic, twine entwisted fairies glisten like the golden covered tree roots that rise up through the Globe’s stage and wrap themselves around its mighty oak pillars. Nature is the ruler here, and Michelle Terry’s Puck embodies this quite beautifully in a slightly sinister mask that wraps around her head in a Medusa-like root ball of entangled undergrowth. It’s as unnerving as it is beautiful and in the hands of Terry’s assured Puck it is also wildly comic.
The four lovers are given plenty of guts and are far from the usual doleful-eyed sleepy heads. Mills’ Hermia and Isobel Thom’s Helena are robust enough to give Vinnie Heaven’s Demetrius and Sam Crerar’s Lysander a run for their money. Control, and even violence are always sat dangerously close to the edge of the roller coaster love story for the four youngsters as they pit their way through the magical forest.
In their dual roles, there is nice contrast between the metallic shimmer of the fairies and the overall-clad Mechanicals in the excellent design work by takis. A fantasy concoction of period dress, Mad Max dystopian steam punk with a little bit of Six the musical thrown in for good measure make for a strong visual. Sarah Finigan’s Snug the Joiner is especially comical, with a nicely downplayed Quince from Rebecca Root.
Marianne Oldham’s elegant Titania is all poise and stature, even as she clambers aboard a suspended hammock-like net in which she slumbers under the spell of Jack Laskey’s finely chiselled Oberon. As Oldham speaks of being “spirited away from fairyland” it is to the passing planes above that she gestures. These are the moments that make the Globe such a uniquely satisfying experience. Artistic director and Puck, Terry knows this only too well also, and positively comes alive amidst the crowd in the Wooden ‘O’, where she so clearly thrives on its stage.
A funky brass band plays James Maloney’s score, full of pulsating tuba and sultry saxophone with some mysterious underscoring throughout as well. This may be one of very many ‘Dreams’ to have been at the Globe in recent years, but as the sun comes out over London it is always a treat to be back.
I’ve seen this play a hundred times, so it’s always a delight when a production shows it in new light
There’s an uneasy edge to the gleeful comedy of Elle While’s production of Shakespeare’s play. Quite right too. Though often rolled out as a merry romp, this is a story of romantic derangement and control, in which the Fairy King, Oberon, drugs and dupes his partner into having sex with an animal.
The darkness never overwhelms the comedy in While’s staging but it’s always there. The story’s Lord of Misrule, Puck, is played by the Globe’s artistic director Michelle Terry as an ambivalent figure, charming but also frightening, who lurches screaming from the ground with a green mask of a face and a matted crown of twigs.
Blurred boundaries are the order of the night. The costumes are broadly Elizabethan, interspersed with outfits that could have come from a 1980s pop video. The Globe’s habitually flexible attitude to gender in casting adds illuminating new layers to the confusion of the young lovers lost in the forest, where their affections are muddled and redirected. Helena is played by Isobel Thom, who is non-binary and starred in I, Joan here last year.
Lysander (Sam Crerar) and Demetrius (Vinnie Heaven) are decidedly androgynous. Francesca Mills, who plays Hermia, is a vibrant comic actress. She also has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, which puts the height-related slurs hurled at Hermia, and her rough treatment by the men, in a disturbing new light. Hers is the standout performance: she absolutely makes the part her own.