Copytaker: “Hello. Copy.” Me: “It”s me. I”ve got the Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Copytaker: “Can’t wait.”
“Magic, but not magical. Fairyland but missing fairies. The latest RSC production may be the first to feature an Illusion director, John Bulleid, and his effects, cleverly co-ordinated with Matt Daw’s lighting that sweeps through the feather-light globes that hang in the air like planets or Chinese lanterns, dominate the action below.
“It’s colourful, beautiful at times, but while the visual pyrotechnics and the voices of Titania’s fairy folk booming through loudspeakers without ever being seen are arresting, they come at the cost of any feeling of intimacy or charm. There are other problems too.
“‘What swaggering home-spuns do we have here?’ Puck asks. So it seems bizarre to cast Mathew Baynton as a middle-class, pinstripe-suited Bottom among these rude mechanicals. Questionable too is some clunky delivery that minces the text—the halting phrases of Boadicea Ricketts’ Helena, every few words demanding a pause, become irritating.
Copytaker: “Is this much more of this, because I”ve got Leeds United on the other line.” Me: “I’ll call you back after the second half.”
Such might have been the conversation had I still been phoning in to the Post, as decades ago I had to do at the interval, to meet early editions. It was always a risk, because the second half can be very different. In which case, the conversation would have continued after the final curtain thus:
Me: “Er, could you cut what I sent earlier, because I’ve changed my mind.
“Fortunately, in a second half, relatively free of distractions, the performers step up to carry the show on their own merits. Ryan Hutton’s Lysander raises laughter between the lines with every cocky, prancing gesture and Ricketts (all is forgiven) is magnificent in her explosive fury. The lovers’ scene in the woods, with Nicholas Armfield as Demetrius and Dawn Sievewright as Hermia, dressed for no good reason but somehow appropriately as a formidable and fiery Highlander, was uproarious.
“Baynton too, coming on for the mechanicals’ play as a cross between Rudolf Nureyev and Laurence Olivier, was able to exploit his comic talents, and improvisation too when a prop rolled off the stage. I was already sympathetic, anyway, for a man forced to come on first in his underpants and later in tights.
“Director Eleanor Rhode works the audience blatantly as she gets the cast to whip up applause for Bottom’s players in their version of Pyramus and Thisbe. So, in the words of Rosie Sheehy as formerly truculent Puck, ‘All is mended.’”
Me: “That’s it. How did United get on?” Copytaker: “They lost. You?” Me: “Mine’s a draw.”