A playful and visually inventive take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is beautifully accessible offering a warm and engaging introduction to Shakespeare for younger audiences, with standout design and integrated captioning. Rating
Excellent
The Unicorn Theatre, in its first co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company, offers a spirited, fast-paced 90-minute edit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for audiences aged 7+. It’s an accessible, playful take, with a particularly striking and thoughtfully integrated use of creative captioning and video design throughout.
At its heart, this is a story of mischievous, misguided love in ancient Athens, where mayhem is celebrated, and where falling for the “right” person proves far from straightforward – especially once a mischievous (and slightly dim-witted) Puck (Josephine-Fransilja Brookman) starts meddling. Alongside the lovers, we have the ever-delightful troupe of hapless amateur actors – bellow menders, tailors, carpenters and joiners – who somehow find themselves performing The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe for the bemused Athenian court. It’s here the production, co-directed by Rachel Bagshaw and Robin Belfield (who also edited the play), feels most at ease: comic, clear and easy-going.
Visually, it’s a treat. The action unfolds within a three-sided, box-like hardboard set, complete with side balconies. A series of gauze-covered panels and shifting walls – paired with a stylish lighting design (Sally Ferguson) – allow spaces to appear and disappear with ease. We move fluidly from court to forest to hidden bowers, with the magical world often quite literally floating above us – most memorably with Titania’s infatuation with Bottom, donkey ears and all, played out like a dreamlike flowery heaven in the sky. Gorgeous.
As the world shifts from the ordered austerity of Athenian life into the more playful chaos of the forest, so too does the design: costumes bloom with colourful patches, hems, and ribbons, with these colours matched by ropes and cords emerging from the set itself. There’s a strong synergy between design elements, but it’s the text and video work – especially the creative captioning – that really stands out. Shakespeare’s language – alongside sequences of moving flowers, fairy voices, stars and magical abstract mayhem – is projected across the set in inventive ways, supporting younger audiences understand the language, while also embedding access for Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences seamlessly into the production.
The energetic cast multi-roll effectively, creating clear, engaging characters, though at times for some the nuance and musicality of Shakespeare’s language proves a stretch. Emmy Stonelake is a comic highlight as Bottom, while also offering a notably more severe Egeus – perhaps a little too villainous – but hinting at the darker undertones of a play that is, at its core, not without its unease and darker edges. The production leans a little too heavily, even easily, into the slapstick and lightness, occasionally skimming past some of the more complex themes – particularly around power almost exclusively in male hands, gender roles and control. While younger audiences relish the comedy, there’s perhaps room to trust them with a little more emotional and thematic depth, especially in the dynamic between Hermia and Helena, where greater empathy and solidarity might have been explored rather than just fighting and screaming.
That said, this is a rich, warm, and visually engaging production, presented by an energised and playful cast with clear stage-audience rapport. Beautifully designed and highly accessible, it offers plenty to enjoy – particularly for those encountering Shakespeare for the first time – even if you’re left wishing it dug a little deeper beneath the surface of the Bard’s complex and multi-layered play.
Script Editor: Robin Belfield
Co-directed by Rachel Bagshaw and Robin Belfield
Design by Lily Arnold
Lighting Design by Sally Ferguson
Lighting Programmer: James Lye
Composer/ Sound Design by Holly Khan
Movement Director: Laura Cubitt
Video & Captions Design by Will Monks
Fight Director: Bethan Clark
Voice Coach: Joel Trill
Assistant Director: Amber Sinclair-Case
Associate Sound Design by Vanessa Garber
Creative Captions Consultant: William Grint
Creative Captions Operator: Reuban Bojang
Costume Supervisor: Isobel Pellow
Costume Makers: Kat Behague, Sophie Lincoln, Foxer Morgan, Rae Hildbrand
A Midsummer Night’s Dream continues its run at Unicorn Theatre until Sunday 10 May. The show is then touring until 30 August.
