“I am a spirit of no common rate,”
Titania tells Bottom, “The summer still doth tend upon my state”… which
isn’t, this year, much of a testimony to her status. At least she is
clothed above the waist, unlike Oberon and Puck; John Light and Matthew
Tennyson may not see this outdoor season out in full health.
Dominic Dromgoole’s production is a consistently vigorous one. This is
sometimes a success, playing as it does to the exuberance of the usual
Globe audience, but on other occasions it is excessive even by those
standards; the
Dream is
hardly Shakespeare’s most subtle play, but it doesn’t just blarge the
whole time. Michelle Terry is attractively obdurate as Hippolyta,
clearly not consenting to her marriage to Theseus (we even see the
battle with her Amazons as a prologue), but in her other role as
Hippolyta she is called upon to be too strident: “We shall chide
downright if I longer stay,” she tells her attendant fairies, making
one wonder what she has been doing for the past several minutes.
Tennyson’s Puck is an arch, self-regarding adolescent, which explains
his absence of sympathy for what fools these mortals be but does not
entice us to join in his scorn.
The quartet of young lovers do the requisite business, with Luke
Thompson standing out as an amusingly blithe and callow Lysander,
whether trying to cajole his way to a sleeping spot next to Hermia or,
later when bewitched, disavowing her in favour of Helena. Inevitably,
though, any production stands (or rather sits) or falls upon its
Bottom. Pearce Quigley is a natural, and more striking here because his
comparatively calm deadpan manner is at odds with the rest of the
staging. This Bottom does not galumph through his scenes (although the
rude mechanicals’ characterisation as clog-wearing Lancastrians bears
fruit when Bottom’s clogs become donkey’s hooves); he stands upon his
own dignity, whether he is preventing a fairy from leaving with a
string of limp jokes or, conversely, taking a prompt for every single
word during the play he has earlier called the tragedy of Pyramus and
Thingy. Dromgoole and his cast keep much of the unseasonal chill off
us; I hope they likewise keep it off themselves.
Written for the Financial
Times.