Shakespeare to Shaggy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream reinvented

As we prepare ourselves for Autumn and the cold it brings, the contemporary and energetic performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe in London is the perfect way to extend the last days of August. Director Emma Rice’s hilarious, but sometimes confusing, adaptation of this classic Shakespeare thrusts the issues of unrequited and forbidden love into the 21^st Century.

With a male, gay Helena (renamed as Helenus and played by Ankhur Bahl) in love with Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa), who is set to be married to Hermia (Anjana Vasan) who has run off with her lover Lysander (Edmund Derrington), and throwing in fairies and love potions, it could be easy to get lost in the whirlwind of events within this play. However, for the most part, the comedy created through such confusion is pulled off with remarkable dexterity and skill.

How any of this manages to resolve itself and end in two happily married couples is almost as incredible and unbelievable as the performance itself.

The play centres around this love quadrangle and the interventions of a mischievous fairy named Puck (Katy Owen) which inadvertently makes Lysander and Demetrius infatuated with Helenus, resulting in a side-splitting confrontation where an almost maniacal Lysander and Demetrius fight tooth and nail for his love.

Meanwhile, the Fairy Queen (Meow Meow), through more of Puck’s interventions, has fallen deeply in love with an actor called Bottom (Ewan Wardrop) who has the head of an ass. How any of this manages to resolve itself and end in two happily married couples is almost as incredible and unbelievable as the performance itself.

The play is set against an Indian background, emphasising the issues of arranged marriages and honour killings that persist in some of these communities.

The acting navigates the fine line between hilarity and incomprehension with precision, faltering only on rare occasions but always ensuring the entire audience is swept along for the ride, often through the wild dancing of the fairies. The play takes a very musical form to spice it up, including interjections of Beyoncé, David Bowie and even Shaggy. Bottom’s voice is particularly stirring, able to change from an operatic thunder to a tinny folk tune at moment’s notice.

Underlying this light-hearted performance are problems that resonate even today and which Emma Rice is not afraid of confronting. The play is set against an Indian background, emphasising the issues of arranged marriages and honour killings that persist in some of these communities. On the sensitivities of this issue, Emma Rice said that “I’ve been working with Tanika Gupta as dramaturge and we felt very strongly that this is happening and shouldn’t be shied away from.”

Every scene is perfectly choreographed to guarantee riotous laughter and rapture.

Among the exquisite performance, it is the details and liquid acting that heighten this play to another level. Whether it is the diversity of the cast, the side-show of the play-within-a-play, the sassiness of gay Helenus, or the playful fiendishness of the fairy Puck, every scene is perfectly choreographed to guarantee riotous laughter and rapture.

Speaking to one of the stewards before the show they said it was their favourite production at the Globe in the eight years they had worked there. Without a doubt, this is a performance not to be missed; it is a perfect celebration of Shakespeare’s timeless sentiments.