To commemorate the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, the RSC has staged a touring production of his best-loved comedy in which the Athenian nobles and principal fairies are played by professional actors, Titania’s fairy train by groups of schoolchildren and the “rude mechanicals” who put on the play-within-the-play and who, let’s be honest, get most of the laughs by amateur groups at each of the tour’s destinations.

On press night, the Nonentities group from Kidderminster (some 25 miles north-west of Stratford) deployed broad West Midlands accents and were expansively led by Chris Clarke as Bottom. Alex Powell as Flute/”Thisbe” also stole several laughs, and as for the bawdy gags... put it this way: the chink in the wall through which the lovers whispered was not portrayed by Simon Hawkins opening his fingers.

As for the production in general, director Erica Whyman has had to solve the equation of both giving it an identity of its own and yet leaving it open enough for the other groups to slot into easily. She gives matters a broadly 1940s look (the last era in which the nation came conspicuously together) but carefully does not push any vision beyond that. The result is often tentative and anaemic. Lucy Ellinson is a terrific actor of modern work (most notably Grounded a couple of years ago), but as Puck – in a too-small tuxedo and with a cowlick in her hair, as if Tintin were trying to impersonate Stan Laurel – her vocal delivery generally lacks the playfulness for which she has undoubtedly been cast. Of the quartet of confused young lovers the women, Mercy Ojelade and Laura Riseborough, have the better time of it. Ojelade’s casting means that the racist insult “Ethiope” hurled at her is in Elizabethan terms accurate... so why is it cut? (Conversely, when Jack Holden’s Lysander calls her a “dwarf”, Ben Goffe, the restricted-growth actor playing fairy Mustardseed, rushes on and thumps him.)

It’s a smart way of wiring Shakespeare into a shared and nationwide sense of Britishness, and ultimately I guess we should be glad that nothing has gone wrong rather than disappointed that it hasn’t gone more spectacularly right.

Written for the Financial Times.