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.
He also gets the entire audience of over a thousand people singing at key moments – a surprisingly stirring thing to be part of. At the matinee I saw there was a rapturous ovation for Tumi Olufawo, promoted from the minor role of Moth to charmingly and spiritedly read the part of Quince in place of the indisposed Victoria Moseley. The Globe is the only theatre in London I can think of where something like this adds to the experience.
The show starts as it means to go on, with the entrance of Duke Theseus (Enyi Okoronkwo, underpowered) and Queen Hippolyta (Audrey Brisson, vampish). His lines about conquering her are excised, and she is heavily pregnant, which puts a more harmonious spin on their relationship. Their earthy, Midlands-accented young subject Hermia (Sophie Cox) is - against her father’s wishes - in love with Lysander, who is here a non-binary character played by Mel Lowe.
Both actors are newcomers making their stage debuts and they acquit themselves admirably, with Lowe transformed into a hip-thrusting rock star by the fairies’ influence and Cox bringing a wrestler’s physicality to the comic fight scenes. But the stage really comes alight with the appearance of Romaya Weaver’s Helena, who brings an erotic edge to her obsession with Gavi Singh Chera’s drippy Demetrius.
There’s a lovely bit of business where he, having been drugged into loving her, attempts to kiss her and ends up tonguing her forbidding palm. His look of delight when she then wipes her hand on his flouncy shirt is hilarious. Grady-Hall, in green tights adorned with white pom-poms and toting several soap-bubble guns, is the amused engine of confusion, rather than the fairy king Oberon (Okoronkwo). Some of the latter’s lines are transferred to his queen Titania (Brisson) and her reaction to his duplicity is the production’s one potentially dark moment.
The subplot involving the rustic artisans rehearsing their play for Theseus’s wedding stands or falls on the casting of Bottom, and he is here played with great sweetness by Adrian Richards. His transformation into an ass is effected by a long-eared headdress and a matching jacket made of silver ribbons, like a disco jack-in-the-green. The inclusion of audience members in their amateur shenanigans is brilliantly effective in this space, where the divide between actors and onlookers is in any case mutable.
Designer Aldo Vázquez gives us exotic blooms that telescope from the musicians’ gallery where the five-piece band pick out spirited, fiddle-and-tuba driven tunes. These sound hundreds of years old but are apparently the work of composer Jim Fortune. Costume designer Fly Davis and Vázquez joyfully mixes Elizabethan and contemporary costumes, pastels and patterns, and delivers gorgeous, flower-embroidered cream ensembles for the wedding finale.
The Dream is the Shakespeare play I’ve seen most often and I therefore approach it with weariness. Lim and her cast made it come alive for me again.
