A warning to purists and the terminally shy: Emily Lim’s playful, folk-inflected, cut-down and cheerfully bashed-about version of Shakespeare’s comedy might not be for you. The Dream is a play about four lovers losing their minds and their hearts in a forest on the whim of a fairy king who also drugs his queen and dupes her into sleeping with a yokel transformed into a donkey. It can be played dark or light. In Lim’s hands it’s a sunny show, decked with trippy flowers and colourful costumes, where the undercurrent of horror is only faintly implied.
There’s copious audience participation, however, which is usually my very idea of horror but works surprisingly well here. The dialogue is frequently truncated, reallocated or augmented with contemporary ad libs. Two audience members are summoned onstage to bulk up the cast of the play-within-a-play and Michael Grady-Hall’s sardonic spirit Puck gets “love juice” in his own eyes as well as those of the deluded lovers and starts a bromance with a spectator.
