Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream(Shakespeare's Globe)

I hope what I've seen so far of the 2026 summer season at Shakespeare's Globe isn't a sign of things to come, as it could spell the beginning of the end of my relationship with one of my favourite venues: After avoiding it for years due to the original management's insistence on original practices sounding a bit theme parky, once I started going I loved the genuine exploration of how the space helps actors play with the text, as well as it becoming one of the few companies where you could count on catching the odd Shakespearean rarity. The latter has been stymied to the point of non-existence recently by economic demands, and the venue has depended a lot on the four most popular comedies - AMND, As You Like It, Much Ado and Twelfth Night.

I thought we were out of the Enema Rice/Covid financial hole but the announcement of three of those four in a single season, with zero Shakespearean tragedies, the mid-table Love's Labour's Lost being classed as a rarity, and only one left-field choice coming up, was concerning for anyone who likes variety. Now the season actually opens with Emily Lim's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which certainly doesn't assuage any worries I might have about the venue going full tourist trap.

It comes less than six months after the company's last production of the same play indoors, and at least it returns it to its status as a comedy after that downright aggressive reinterpretation. But this Dream does have something in common with Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hyat's, in that neither is going to let what's actually in the script get in the way of its high concept. Here that focuses on the community theatre aspect of the story, which sees a group of amateur actors rehearse a very silly play to perform at a royal wedding.

So the production leans very heavily on audience participation, with Puck (Michael Grady-Hall) conducting the crowd in singalong moments, and Quince (Victoria Moseley) holding auditions before the show starts, for groundlings to take part in the performance later. There's definite shades of panto, as well as of the edited and slightly sanitised productions aimed at younger audiences. But I've enjoyed some of the Globe's Deutsche Bank productions specifically tailored to schools more than this, and in any case if this is Baby's First Shakespeare it would have been nice for it to be advertised as such.

These scenes of the Rude Mechanicals are the strongest of the afternoon, with Adrian Richards as very much a drama camp Bottom in a Cats T-shirt, enthusiastically hogging the spotlight, and Jamal Franklin's Snug also getting a nice little comic through-line as he tries to learn how to roar. But the lovers (Gavi Singh Chera as Demetrius, Sophie Cox as Hermia, Mel Lowe as Lysander and Romaya Weaver as Helena) feel like they've very much been left to their own devices, and while most of the audience did laugh a lot over the course of the afternoon, what is usually this quartet's funniest scene went by unusually quietly.

And I think this is ultimately what failed to grab me: I love Shakespeare comedies being mined for all the physical and visual gags the setups suggest, as well as the dialogue being adapted to fit the time and place it's being performed in. But outside of the 400-year-old standup routines there's actually a lot of funny lines that do still work for a modern audience, and it's a bit sad to see all the inspired nonsense in Pyramus and Thisbe getting tumbleweed because it's being rushed through so we can get to the next pratfall or ad-lib.

There were some encouraging moments: Rather than getting bogged down in deciding Theseus' (understudy Jason Battersby) "I wooed thee with my sword" is the only line of any significance in the whole play, Lim quickly dismisses a lot of its problematic implications by giving it to Hippolyta (Audrey Brisson) and making her the dominant one in the power dynamic. We also get a tweak of "do you marry him" to make it an actual joke that might conceivably work in the 21st century. Plus the whole thing's quite short. These three positives aside though, this sexless production which deals with the chaotic story by giving up on even trying to tell it was not for me.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 29th of August at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.