A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Greenwich Theatre review ****

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Greenwich Theatre, 24th May 2018

This was the third and final leg of Lazarus Theatre’s hitherto excellent season at the Greenwich Theatre. The previous productions, Edward II (Edward II at Greenwich Theatre review ****) and The Lord of Flies (Lord of the Flies at Greenwich Theatre review ****), both showed off Artistic Director Ricky Dukes’s inventive and combative ideas, and the young, fearless casts, to best effect. This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was similarly imbued with image, movement and ambition, but fell down a little on the delivery of verse and on pacing.

Getting Shakespeare’s lines out right isn’t easy. There are plenty of experienced actors who steer clear of the challenge. Practice may not make perfect but plainly it helps. Our cast here was, by and large, just out of drama school. Mr Dukes aim is to present theatre to as young and diverse an audience as he can. This will only work if his cast is similarly diverse. In Lord of the Flies he explored the tension from opening up gender in the casting. The young actors largely became the characters from William Golding’s novel filtered through Nigel Williams’s excellent adaptation. In Edward II the slightly more experienced cast, to a man and woman, nailed Marlowe’s muscular prose helped by Mr Dukes’s dramatic reshaping of the text.

Here though the verse was uneven and the spell was, at times, broken. This is not a criticism, just a reality. Max Kinder’s Lysander and Saskia Vaigncourt-Strallen’s Helena were the most accomplished speakers but the rest of the cast shone in other ways. Tessa Carmody played Puck as an enthusiastic, elfin ingenue not really up to the tasks allotted to her by Oberon. She was very funny. Eli Caldwell stepped into the limelight as a camp Flute in a tutu and Zoe Campbell captured the downtrodden air of a mechanical in her Snout. Jonathon George captured Demetrius’s slightly sour air, John Slade’s Quince was an exasperated but ineffective director and David Clayton was a bumptious Bottom, though might have been better served without the full donkey mask. Elham Mahyoub is an extraordinarily expressive actor in terms of face and movement, and, I mean no offence, was perfectly Hermia-sized. Lanre Danmola was a peeved Oberon with an air of making up his mischief as he went along, Ingvild Lakou’s Titania being suitably unimpressed.

The production really came alive when the director’s eye for movement, design (Jamie Simmons once again using the most mundane of materials), lighting (Stuart Glover) and sound (Sam Glossip) came together. Like all three of the Lazarus productions there is idea after idea which is simple but oh so effective. The highlight was Pyramis and Thisbe, here delivered in an hilarious song and dance routine, which the posh quartet get pulled in to. Like most recent productions Lazarus sort to uncover the darker elements in Shakespeare’s pastoral, though it is humour and joy which dominates. With more money, (which this company richly deserves), and more time, I reckon Lazarus, without too much fiddling with the stripped-back aesthetic, could create a memorable Dream. A Festival setting perhaps?

I don’t know what Lazarus will get up to next but I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out. This is not the most polished theatre you will ever see, and there are occasional missteps, it but it will restore your faith in what theatrical classics can deliver if you are already a luvvie, and should persuade you what you have been missing if you are a reluctant newbie. It’s better than Love Island. Mind you most things are.