Midsummer Night's Dream, Young Vic

Robert Lepage directed the play in the Olivier in an NT production on a fully-mudded stage in a dark production which divided the critics and audiences. Rupert Graves was one of the male lovers.

This was one of the first productions I ever saw and I thought it was bloody fantastic and still have really fond memories of it

Went this afternoon. 2 hours exactly straight through. Great fun. Very pleased to have caught it.

I didn't like it. It was a deeply cynical take on the play - not dark, just drab. I have no idea why the mud pit although it did allow for Demetrius and Lysander to really go at it in their fights and it was effective for humbling Helena and, particularly, Hermia, by shoving their faces in it. It's a production that's determined to erase any magical elements in order to remind us - if we needed reminding - that the world is a sh*tty place.

I did not find the mechanicals funny and thought the approach to Bottom was ghastly - no fault of Leo Bill's, he was under orders. Some of the sight gags would have been rejected by the Three Stooges as beneath them. No, I really didn't like it.

My 17 year old son went to see this with his sixth form college last week. He really enjoyed it. My partner, who went to pick him up from the Young Vic said that all the students were outside animatedly discussing it when he got there. I guess that for most of them (my son included) it will have been the first production of Midsummer Night's Dream they had seen.

An abject (and object) lesson in how to make the funny unfunny, I hated this.

Some spoilers follow. . .

As with much comedy, Shakespeare gets laughs by subverting highfalutin notions, especially romantic love, with base ones. The higher a production of this play builds the tower of romantic love's pretensions, the greater the shock and surprise of the comedy the tower makes as it clatters to the ground.

Joe Hill-Gibbins has no handle on Shakespeare's humour, so he builds us a filthy dirty muddy crass concept of romantic love, leaving himself with no notion to subvert over the course of the play. Since the tower of love has already tumbled from the opening of the play, as we witness the actors sploshing around in mud in the opening scene, Shakespeare's comedy is itself subverted and destroyed.

Hill-Gibbins fondness for desecration can work in non-comedy settings. His dirtying up of "The Changeling," which included great sploshing food fights, also at The Young Vic, seemed to illuminate the essential filth at the heart of that play.

But if Hill-Gibbins is going to desecrate a comedy, tossing away it's raison d'etre, he'd better replace all those lost laughs with something else worth watching.

If he thinks that showing us that love is akin to rape is a revelation, he's wrong. That is already apparent in Shakespeare's design, so all Hill-Gibbins achieves is to reveal Shakespeare's design too early.

I think what might be going on is akin to an acting exercise, where Hill-Gibbins is trying to break down both the play and actors by degrading them, so he can build them back up, making something fresh and new. In one sense, he succeeds, as Anastasia Hille seemed preternaturally youthful, skipping around like a little girl, as she emerged from the mudpit, and Leo Bill seemed genuinely humbled by crawling around on all fours like a dog, seeking hugs from his fellow actors.

Indeed, the sploshing fetish is known to trigger psychic liberation from repressions implanted by childhood cleanliness-obsessive parents, and whether it is food or mud, Hill-Gibbins always seems to seek psychic exorcism through sploshing.

But the effect on myself was less revelatory. I felt I had been invited to a tawdry dogging, sitting there fulled clothed, peeping at people at their most vulnerable, sploshing and crawling in mud, as if peeping through the window of a car in the dead of night.

Luckily, not all of Shakespeare's comedy in this play relies on subverting highfalutin notions. At the end of the play, Shakespeare has already achieved this subversion, so he has the rude mechanicals indulge in an outright celebration of baseness, stupidity and crudeness. Crudeness is something in Hill-Gibbin's wheelhouse, and the rude mechanicals are genuinely funny. I laughed at Leo Bill's Bottom, and even more so at Aaron Heffernan's Flute, who unselfconsciously appeared as the most stupid man alive, playing Thisbe.

But if stupidity and filth are the destination, it is a shame that Hill-Gibbins started in much the same place. He gave himself nowhere to go, pointlessly gutting the comedy over the course of the first three quarters of the play. Unfunny comedy is something I can't stand.

2 stars (for an attempt at something original, despite it's dismal failure).

PS: This flop Midsummer makes me mourn anew the banishing of Emma Rice from the Globe. Her Midsummer was one of the funniest I've seen, as she used music and art and dancing and interactivity and roleplay and sheer joy to build a towering conception of love, which degenerated into the most playful and childish broad comedy I have ever witnessed. Bon voyage, Emma!

Hille has been the poor man's Redgrave for at least 10 years. It was particularly noticeable (and I pointed it out here) in the NT "Dido Queen of Carthage" in 2009.