It might seem strange to put on a play set at the height of summer in the middle of December. But the colourful excess of the RSC’s latest take on Shakespeare’s comedy – transferring to the Barbican under the direction of Eleanor Rhode after premiering in Stratford in January – fits the season.
This production only skims the darker depths of the magical-drugging plot device that triggers the play’s love-swapping shenanigans, when four young lovers on the run in the forest outside Athens get caught up in fairy king Oberon’s season-disrupting feud with Titania. The play’s blurred lines between love and ownership and the intoxication of lust are mostly played for laughs.
There’s great physical comedy from Ryan Hutton as a strutting Lysander, counterpointed by Nicholas Armfield’s stiffly wax-jacketed brown-nose, Demetrius. Boadicea Ricketts gives Helena real emotional heft. You wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Dawn Sievewright as Hermia. Sirine Saba’s Titania is perfectly pitched for the camp tone. Katherine Pearce’s Puck is less malevolent sprite, more ‘chuck a TV out of a hotel room on tour’ type.
The aesthetic of Lucy Osborne’s costume design is a decades-jumbled Mods and (Punk) Rockers. It’s a neat visual flourish that distinguishes the stuffy Athenian court from the anarchy of the forest. Andrew Richardson’s Oberon has seemingly wandered straight out of Adam and The Ants’ Prince Charming, while his version of Duke Theseus owes a country-sized debt to King Charles.
It's a chocolate-box treat of a show in terms of spectacle, from the dreamy arc of paper lanterns signifying the forest to illusion designer John Bulleid’s interpretation of the secondary fairies as mischievous points of light, ringing phones, reanimating things and generally causing chaos. It’s like watching Shakespeare on a sugar-rush. This production is determined to keep your eyes busy.
But for all the fun touches – and there are many – Rhode’s production is let down by some seemingly compulsive mugging and winking at the audience. Mathew Baynton, who plays Bottom, is star casting, brilliantly funny in TV shows like Ghosts, but he’s given too much rope to grandstand here. The scenes involving the Mechanicals sometimes feel like panto, and not in a good way.
When this production stops shouting over the play and actually works with the verse, it soars. The wafty experimental theatre pastiche that accompanies the Mechanicals’ crappy performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in the final act is really funny – and Baynton, in particular, shines – because it responds to what Shakespeare is doing rather than just smirking at the audience from the wings. During these moments, the comedy is pretty dreamy.
