Last summer, Shakespeare’s Globe reopened after its pandemic closure with a party-popper version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring water pistols, a piñata donkey and a deliriously funny Pyramus and Thisbe. This summer, the theatre has had a bright idea for its indoor playhouse. What if, a year after the events of that play, the mechanicals were back to perform again for the Duke and Duchess, this time with a show “less tragic, more magic” to celebrate their first anniversary?
Liberating Bottom and co from Shakespeare’s play appeals to my eight-year-old daughter, Hilda, as we make our way there. She has seen the Dream on TV and reckons it’s “more confusing than Diana Wynne Jones”. Aimed at the over-fives, Midsummer Mechanicals is presented by the Globe and Splendid Productions, whose artistic director, Kerry Frampton, is the co-writer (with Ben Hales), co-director (with Lucy Cuthbertson) and an affably silly host as Bottom. With caterpillar eyebrows and bushy sideburns, Frampton makes the young audience feel right at home. Ribbons are tied around the theatre’s pillars and silky bunting hangs across the stage. Although “it’s not very comfy, is it?” mutters Hilda as she gets used to the playhouse’s austere benches.
The script puts the Dream’s themes and storyline in a spin, resulting in the mechanicals’ performance of The Adventures of the Weaver and the Fairy Queen. The first half is backstage drama, as Bottom, Peter Quince, Francis Flute and Patience (wife of Tom) Snout limber up for their performance; the set is then transformed for the play-within-the-play in the second half.
I think the first half drags a little but Hilda disagrees. As a fan of The Play That Goes Wrong, she also enjoys the similar am-dram gags as the show comes undone through lines being read in the wrong order, thespy pretensions and pratfalls. Bottom has some fine malapropisms as he boasts about his drama of “historic impotence”; the audience are required to rally the nervous Quince (a richly warm performance from Jamal Franklin); and this time it’s Flute (bombastically funny Sam Glen) who wants to play the lion, too, attempting to hog any spare parts. Hilda thinks Flute’s Fairy Queen is a hoot, but the character this audience really get behind is Patience (Melody Brown, detonating her deadpan asides). You sense their outrage at the very idea that as a woman she is not allowed to act on stage.
References abound to other plays, including King Lear and Hamlet, and Hilda enjoys the bear’s pursuit from The Winter’s Tale, with the creature almost swinging off the side of the stage. “It’s like Romeo and Juliet!” she whispers as we’re given a recap from Pyramus and Thisbe. Older viewers will recognise references to the Dream’s darker themes, including entrapment.
This playhouse is a place for young audiences to fall in love with stagecraft, and Bottom’s opening speeches really get us thinking about the space. Hilda likes Rose Revitt’s designs (especially the forest of the second half) and is intrigued by the use of trapdoors. She likes the way Bottom weaves in and out of the audience and how we contribute weather effects as well as lines to the merry, folksy songs. Bottom’s hopeless adoration of acting is lampooned but the sense of wonder at these performances is clear in the young audience, who rightly find the final bum joke to be irresistibly cheeky.
At the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 21 August.
