This production of Shakespeare’s classic ‘doesn’t reinvent the wheel’ but it’s ‘gleeful’
“Many critics sigh at the prospect of yet another ‘Dream’, Shakespeare’s most accessible and most performed play,” said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. Yet for me the play – a “joyful skip through the Athenian forest, packed as it is with errant lovers, mischievous fairies and some joyously bad amateur dramatics” – is usually a delight. And so it proves with Elle While’s “assured” new staging at the Globe, which is “easily the best Shakespeare offering I have seen at this venue in some years”. The largely female cast includes Globe artistic director Michelle Terry as an “exceedingly Puck-ish Puck”, and Mariah Gale as weaver Nicola Bottom (or “Bot-tome”, as this Bottom insists, with her “delusions of actorly grandeur”). Accessible, witty and meaningful, “this is exactly what the Globe should be doing”.
