Theatre review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Glasgow

IF YOU like your Shakespeare long, languid, and lavishly resourced, then this brief post-student race around A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Emily Reutlinger as part of the Bard In The Botanics season, is not for you.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is part of Bard In The Botanics seasonA Midsummer Night's Dream is part of Bard In The Botanics season
A Midsummer Night's Dream is part of Bard In The Botanics season

A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Botanics, Glasgow

* * *

Crammed into 95 minutes without an interval, and performed by a company so small that the five actors often barely have time to run behind a tree before they have to re-emerge as a different character, the show plays fast and loose with the ordering of Shakespeare’s scenes, and belts through the text at such a pace that poetry and real lyricism are in short supply, despite the presence of four supernumerary fairies in strange floral headgear floating around without a word of their own to speak.

Despite the hectic pace, though – and a doubling and trebling of roles so confusing that it absolutely requires an audience already familiar with the play – there’s a huge charge of youthful energy and anarchy that responds brilliantly to the essential playfulness of Shakespeare’s text.

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David Rankine and Meghan Tyler are damned nearly irresistible as leading lovers Lysander and Hermia, although Tyler – who also plays the comic lead, Bottom – almost squeaks and growls herself hoarse in the course of the evening. And although a scrappy rewrite of the ending means we miss its beautiful, magical conclusion, a rousing chorus of Patti Smith classic Because The Night sung by the whole cast sends us happily off into the evening.

Seen on 02.07.15

• Until 11 July

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