“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Barbican
Jeremy Malies in the City of London
17 December 2024
I’ve witnessed the second scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set everywhere from the studio of a Buster Keaton movie to a mountain outpost in British colonial India. Perhaps the clue, as director Eleanor Rhode realizes in this superb RSC production, lies in the profession of the woman who is producing the interlude for us?
Andrew Richardson and Sirine Saba.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
Rita (yes, a gender-flip) Quince played by Helen Monks is a tailor. Rhode and set designer Lucy Osborne (who is also responsible for the Sixties-ish somewhat Mod-ish costumes) have the Rude Mechanicals hatch the idea for their play in a tailor’s shop full of mannequins, tape measures, and irons. It’s a great start to an outstanding version of the play.
The production is anchored on Matthew Baynton, star of BBC sitcom Ghosts, as a thoughtful, reflective Bottom who truly gels with regal Sirine Saba as Titania in her bower. Rhode, Osborne, and lighting designer Matt Daw ease us through this familiar scene with a novel approach to the fairies who in this iteration are “spirits of no common rate” to quote Titania. The sequence can so easily become cloying, but with the fairies existing to an extent in our own imagination, the production remains streamlined and agile.
Another clue as to how intelligent and generally savvy this whole endeavour is? Shakespeare would have bridled at the voguish label of metatheatricality. And yet, Quince as stage manager of the “Pyramus and Thisbe” interlude stops midway through the rehearsal, and at an important juncture of the play, to tell us how difficult it is to sustain illusion in the theatre. Creatives here include magic consultant John Bulleid who keeps the illusions going such that I felt there was a wizardry running right across the brutalist architecture of the Barbican even in the interval.
Matthew Baynton as Bottom.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
This Dream is never saccharine and rarely pastoral. The Helena (Boadicea Ricketts) scrap with Hermia (Dawn Sievewright) is unusually savage. Glaswegian Sievewright, using her resting accent and even wearing a kilt, lays into Ricketts prompting the latter to recall, “She was a vixen when she went to school …” You don’t doubt it. And yet voice coach Kate Godfrey helps Ricketts find a lyrical tone as she reflects on how close the women once were. “Like to a double cherry, seeming parted …” Of all the plays, this is the one that convinces me that whoever wrote it grew up in the country.
Ricketts is particularly affecting and deserving of empathy as she reflects that, with both men now courting her, she must be the victim of a horrible practical joke. Like Twelfth Night this can be a vicious play.
Osborne, with props and design help from Tina Torbey, has lovers Sievewright and Ryan Hutton (who plays Lysander) exploring the woods of Athens laden with sleeping bags and rucksacks and using an Ordnance Survey map as though they have just kitted themselves out at British camping store Millets. There are similar subtle visual gags throughout. And yet there is always a harder edge, and they are indeed lost in the forest.
Any reservations? As Puck, Katherine Pearce makes no real impact, never proving impish or sprightly. That may of course not be the point but whatever angle the actor was taking on the role, I never saw any logic to it in what is otherwise a coherent evening.
As Oberon/Theseus, Andrew Richardson proves multi-faceted as he and the courtiers watch the mechanicals put on their play. Richardson has the character alternate between a brittle aristocratic disdain for the lower orders to an amused admiration for their chutzpah in making their classical interlude work even if much of the humour is against rather than with them.
Monks excels again here, playing keyboards on stage with the stops and starts in her music serving to show when each sequence should come to an end. She is working within the overall musical composition of Will Gregory (there are musician lofts on either side of the stage) and together they give the impression that the interlude is a spontaneous happening. Nothing is being imposed from outside; the comedy and mishaps are springing up spontaneously.
Rhode pushes hard at her themes all night. (There is a central conceit relating to her handling of the metaphysical world that is best left under wraps.) This is not a concept production that runs out of steam. It’s clean, fresh, inventive but also disciplined. Wonderful.
