A Midsummer Night's Dream, Globe

Was going to the dress rehearsal but felt ill and had to leave, unfortunately. It certainly looks good.

Shakespeare seems to attract a certain type of nutter.

Yes, the above posts tipped me finally over the edge last night to get me a ticket for the Yard. I was always curious and interested because of Emma (Kneehigh) Rice and Ankur (DV8) Bahl, and intrigued by Meow Meow, but was too jaded by Shakespeare to attend. However, the provocative whingers have provoked me to go and I'm now really looking forward to it.

Well I'm in no hurry to see the earth's core, so... 

Anyway I am going to approach this debut season with an open mind. If there's anything I've taken away from 10 years of attending the RSC, is that I always want to see Shakespeare done in fascinating (and indeed strange) ways.

Just as long as it works within the context of the plays. You can't just hammer them into a shape that suits your vision (I'm looking at you Wooster Group)

Just saw the matinee today yes you can say it is very left field and abundant with diversity but I do feel that Emma Rice was slightly steered down this route for her inaugural globe tenure to distance this from D Dromgoole excellent rendition a few years ago which was more to the traditional standing. This production may prove to be a marmite production, putting ageism aside I feel and certainly from this afternoons audience a younger crowd will take to this more which to some part is the brief of making the Bard more accessible. All on stage are mic'd up so the dialogue can be scrutinised even more than usual. After seeing the cast announcement for this a had reservations about Meow Meow but after seeing the production I think in most parts it worked out well and also for the Helena switch so I would give this an above neutral review.

Well it certainly looks interesting from the photos, most magical set if nothing else, I'm really hoping this is a good season even if i have to adjust my ideas a bit of what i expect there, i've had so many great days out there.

So argon Helena has become Helenus? It's play male? I'm curious.

Interesting indeed though I must be half asleep as got to the end and was trying work out how the lovers would work when they get all mixed up and then read the last paragraph and went 'ohhhh'. Interesting take that and a good interview, I can't claim to be young and fit (just poor and addicted to being near the front) but that's probably the best article I've read on her planned direction, everything else just kept saying she was going to do lots of new radical stuff and then named things that already happen and kept harping on that she didn't like Shakespeare. I've booked a couple of things but will watch people's views now, I could easily be tempted there more this summer.

A hybrid of CBeebies, Porn and a Psychedelic Rock gig, this playful production of Shakespeare is pure Carnival, and I loved it!

Welcome, Emma Rice!!!

Some spoilers follow. . .

I agree this is going to be divisive. To a degree, there is so much going on that it's hard to hear Shakespeare's verse sometimes, partly because there is a wall to wall music soundtrack, and partly because so much is happening visually, that it's hard to concentrate.

The music is the music of sex: rhythmic bass, either bass guitar or double bass, accompanying a centrally situated Sitar, which played together makes for an atmosphere redolent of the sexual abandon of the psychedelic Sixties. Think of the opening strumming of the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black," backed up by the bassline from Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," but without Mick Jagger's droning to turn it into a downer.

About the theatre, the party atmosphere is bolstered by large white balloons, which politely suggest female fertility, resembling enormous eggs, and lengthy plastic floating flutes suggest male phalluses.

Periodically, the players appear to share and light spliffs, but without the show that Sheridan Smith made of doing the same in Michael Grandage's "Midsummer Night's Dream." Here it's just part of the wallpaper, it's a party after all. That Grandage Dream got it's frolic from David Walliam's mugging as Bottom, but in this show, everybody's mugging. This show's Bottom, the only male in the Pyramus acting troupe, often carries and plays a banjolele and mimics the squeaky high-pitched speaking voice of George Formby. Ewan Wardrop as Bottom is a scream!

The Mechanicals in this show come on dressed like Globe workers, wearing t-shirts that say "Globe Team." I was suckered, like almost everyone else, into believing they were working the show, but when one of them came to clean one of the large round banquet tables, placed among us Groundlings, she did such a terrible job that I twigged she must be an actor lol.

That's a clever trick, because it introduces the theme of transformation and carnival that hangs over the whole show. If Globe workers can be actors, and men can be women, and women can be men, and sitars can bring Indian sounds into the bastion of Shakespeare's Britishness, then anyone can be anything. It's liberating.

Some will hate the exaggerated emotive acting style that is adopted by some of the players in this show. There is a distinct air of CBeebies about the Mechanicals talking to us, the children, with a Globe Worker, who turns out to be Bottom, warning us to allow actors to leave first in the event of a fire. The 4 lovers are even more childish than the Mechanicals, pouting and whining like teenagers.

While some players come off as Children's entertainers, others such as Meow Meow (who plays Titania and Hippolyta), come off as raunchy adult entertainers in a Cabaret club. And our ertswhile children's entertainers are apt to change constume and join Meow Meow as fecund forest-dwelling crotch-grabbing singing sprites.

Bottom sings, Titania sings, the lovers sing (in tight pants), even Zubin Varla, as Oberon and Theseus, the most traditionally adept verse speaker is apt to burst into song. The sitar and pounding bass accompany them, though a dashing Edmund Derrington, as Lysander, singing with soft seductive tunefulness, plays his own guitar as he woos Hermia into a frenzy for the first time.

The gender swapping of Helenus and Puck both work wonders to spark this whole smorgasbord of craziness into full Carnival mode.

Ankur Bahl's Helenus has all the sassy camp moves of a Lady Gaga backing dancer, though it's Beyonce's "Put a ring on it" that he sings and dances and preens with Anjana Vasan's geeky glasses-wearing Hermia. At some point, you just know those Clark Kent glasses will be discarded, as carnival infects Hermia's soul.

Katy Owen's Puck is a marvel, impish, dressed like an elf, with devil's horns, but springing and placing her slight stature in front of every single groundling she can get her hands on, making full provocative prolonged playful eye contact with all of them. In one crazy moment, she fed a groundling a banana and snogged him. From child's play to raunchy sex, in the batting of an eye. I was afraid, and backed away from the tables in the pit every time she came near lol.

Fittingly, among all the gender-swapping, David Bowie's "Space Oddity" gets an outing, a reminder of Bowie's pioneering gender bending.

After Emma Rice conducts the Carnival of music and sex and gender-swapping and interactivity to a climax, it feels like the show's over, but then she boldly stages a very full prolonged production of "Pyramus and Thisbe" by the Mechanicals. It is as if the Mechanicals all attended Cornley Polytechnic, as this is undoubtedly a production of "Pyramis and Thisbe Goes Wrong," a reasserting of utter silliness that dispels the sex and trangression into the ether, before itself receding before Shakespeare's verse.

This is a crazy musical night out. If Dromgoole staged Shakespeare in a fun way, Rice stages fun in a Shakespearean way. Some of the Shakespeare is lost in the morass, but it's impossible to care, when you've half forgotten who you are.

4 and a half stars

Fantastic review Steve! Seems an interesting production. I was planning to make Macbeth my first play at the Globe, but I might try this instead.

4 stars in the telegraph, it questioned the speakers but mostly it seemed as they weren't necessary but gave big thumbs up generally all round and said the school groups were captivated, with a bit of luck this will overturn some people's views that Shakespeare is old and dry and dull, it clearly won't be for everyone and I'm banking on some productions being played more traditional with regards to the space and lighting and sound but looks like a very strong start for Emma Rice.

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk features just two actors and two musicians, so Emma Rice's Samamaker "HELLO I'M HERE" just next month should be a bit different!

Great review Steve. Makes me wish I had booked just to see what it is all about. But then the balloons...hmmm