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.
