I must admit that director Dmitry Krymov’s remarks in the programme made my heart sink before the show. All that talk about bringing out the truth of a great love story by having the low-comic “mechanicals” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream enact their tale of Pyramus and Thisbe with four-metre-high rod puppets made me fear the most self-indulgent kind of director’s theatre. In the event, Krymov and his Laboratory/School of Dramatic Art production (appearing in Stratford, and later in the Edinburgh International Festival, under the aegis of Moscow’s Chekhov International Theatre Festival) proved a far rarer and more welcome experience: a show that refused to allow me not to like it, even love it.
    
At first it is simply a matter of innumerable smart jokes, such as replacing Peter Quince’s mis-punctuated prologue with an equally nervous and even more complex speech about enjoyment, or having the “audience” of dignitaries interrupt proceedings with mobile phone calls or flummoxed remarks that “It’s modern art.” (All the while a Russian family behind me chattered away, blithely ignorant that they were precisely the targets of the onstage satire.) And those gags continue throughout the 95-minute presentation, ending with the mechanicals’ epilogue dance being replaced by a slightly galumphing quartet of ballerinas performing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy whilst the stage is swept clean around them. But by this point the picture has broadened and deepened considerably.
    
Each puppet figure is manipulated by several performers, which demands appreciable skill in itself, with still more required when the company begin feats of acrobatics to get up to sufficient altitude to hand huge Pyramus the bouquets he will later present to Thisbe. There is even, I kid you not, an acrobatic Jack Russell terrier which transcends mere winsomeness and emerges as a talented comedian in its own right.
    
Then Krymov’s ideas about the potency of the romantic archetype begin to pay off as well. As the lovers communicate in Lieder, amusement is augmented by poignancy. An obvious but deft outsize-dick routine is followed by the lion’s attack on Thisbe, which is simultaneously comic and an unexpectedly shocking analogue of defloration or even rape. When Pyramus discovers his beloved’s bloody clothes, he literally goes to pieces, and recites as an elegy Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
    
Twenty performers are credited (including Venya the Jack Russell), but there seem to be many more. As the onstage audience depart, the venerable Liya Akhedzhakova, hitherto the most insistent interrupter, recognises one of the mechanicals as an old flame, and we see echoed on a human scale what has just been presented so much larger than life. The more I think about the piece, the more profundity and joy I find in it, intertwined like lovers, at once silly and euphoric.
     
Written for the Financial Times.