Promotion for this Royal Shakespeare Company production has dwelt heavily and rightly on the casting of Mathew Baynton, the appealing star of Horrible Histories and Ghosts, as Bottom. His performance as the weaver and would-be amdram star – sweet, self-regarding and baffled – is the tonal linchpin of Eleanor Rhode’s visually stunning staging, which balances the humour and the pathos of being led romantically astray and temporarily out of one’s mind.
Baynton also rocks a pipe-thin, chalk-stripe, double-breasted Carnaby Street suit with orange socks, manifesting Ray Davies in the early days of the Kinks. Indeed, Theseus’s Athens, where four aristocratic lovers and Bottom’s working-class cohort are mixed, matched and messed about by supernatural forces, is a kind of living archive of late 20th-century British fashion.
Hermia’s a punky Scot, Lysander a rude boy, Demetrius a Hooray in a Barbour, Helena a sultry, passionate New Romantic in white. Andrew Richardson – unrecognisable from his breakthrough as Sky in the Bridge Theatre’s Guys and Dolls – somewhat awkwardly channels King Charles as Theseus and a mix of Adam Ant and Robert Smith as fairy king Oberon.
Fittingly, the onstage band rattle through musical genres that range from what sounds like an Eighties B-side to lewd bedroom funk when Baynton’s delighted Bottom, unwittingly turned into an ass by Oberon’s henchman, is seduced by the lusty and similarly traduced Titania (Sirine Saba).
It's no disrespect to the generally fine ensemble acting of the cast, or their finery, to say you’ll notice the set first. Lucy Osborne, who also did the costumes, gives us a backdrop of a stylised sun and an almost bare stage adorned at one point with a beautiful plethora of planet-like spheres, and at another with a forest of ladders, around which the confused lovers chase each other. This strikes me as an oblique reference to Peter Brook’s stark, groundbreaking Dream from 1970: if so, the show wears it lightly.
There’s lots of nice nuance here; in the way the lovers get more dishevelled and brutish the more deranged they become; in the fact that Bottom and the other Mechanicals keep forgetting Snug the Joiner’s name. The travesty of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that the Mechanicals enact for Theseus at the end, once order has been restored, usually bores me with its broad comedy and sneering. But Rhode edits and paces it judiciously, and Baynton again sets the tone for a set of fine comic turns.
On the minus side, the show is stately and complacent at times, partly because it originated in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where there’s nothing to do but submerge yourself in Bardic veneration for three hours. The junior cast members get a raw deal, their voices used for Titania’s fairies while they are otherwise deployed as supernumeraries and understudies.
But these are quibbles about an intelligent, witty and visually dazzling staging, a mad, mid-summery alternative to traditional shows this Christmas.
The Barbican Centre, to Jan 18; buy tickets here
