“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Chichester Festival Theatre
Jeremy Malies in West Sussex
★★☆☆☆
30 September 2026
It’s quite something for a child to reject a spouse chosen by her father and head for the woods with another woman in defiance of a rigid, heteronormative social background. That is what Hermia (Angela Sant’Albano) is doing in this Dream set in Chichester in 1994 with the younger aristocratic characters and the fairies cavorting on the South Downs. Her lover, Lysander, is played by Ellie Larkin who is unmistakably feminine. As a sharp contrast to the Conservative Party heartland of the senior mortals, the Downs are revealed to be frenzied and Dionysian in a set by Joanna Scotcher that pulsates with Britpop, skateboarding, and grunge styling.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
Risibly, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of this year cited “repetitive beats” when seeking to apply significant brakes on the rise of rave culture. The precise backdrop chosen by co-directors Justin Audibert and Hannah Joss is the unlicensed ecstasy-driven rave parties that were sweeping the country at the time. You could phone from a callbox (a payphone kiosk emerges from a trap door) and be told the address of a rave. I must have been at the wrong party.
Both strata of society are buoyant here. There has been economic recovery under John Major, and nobody laments Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, as Hippolyta, Celeste Dodwell defaces a photograph of the Iron Lady. Dodwell is the fiancée of the MP for Chichester (the Theseus equivalent) played here by Tom Kanji. The Mechanicals – this blurs the social distinction somewhat – are members of the West Sussex Conservative Association.
At a detailed level – it’s a stretch since he had no Sussex links and was a Mancunian – Hermia’s disciplinarian father, Egeus, played by Henry Everett, is styled on Sir James Anderton, a chief constable of Greater Manchester Police whose moral crusade against pornography and prostitution at the time saw him order the pulping of incendiary publications such as The Sun’s “Page Three Annual”.
Scotcher has the aristocrats literally looking down on everybody from an elevated hunting observation point on the two-tier set. This is a production in which Theseus is resonant when saying that his hounds are “bred out of the Spartan kind”. The production also scores well when there is talk of the city walls; Chichester’s own walls are intact, Roman, and date from the third century.
The parallels between Elizabethan festivities and the 90s rave scene that the creative team has in mind soon become apparent. It clearly wasn’t all small ale and Morris dancing in the 1590s. Elizabethans seeking a high might have looked to the nightshade family of plants and ingested mandrake and henbane. This project is that rare thing, a concept production where scene after scene can draw inspiration from the central conceit. And yet I didn’t enjoy it. Perhaps everybody else was in, let’s say, an altered state from a party drug?
Why couldn’t I feel the groove? Was I being an unusually curmudgeonly version of Eeyore? Or were there aspects that were pantomimic? As Dodwell strutted around in caricatured mode using a horsewhip on people, I reflected that she could usefully acquire a few more gestures. Yes, there are some broad brushes being applied deliberately here but Eve Ponsonby as Titania comes nowhere near the lyricism of her lines when describing her infatuation with Bottom. There is botanical imagery that ought to play into the hands of the team, but Ponsonby in her glittering bodice [illustrated] suggests debauched psychedelic sexuality (an important ingredient, no doubt) but nothing else. She reminded me of Cynthia Payne. There is certainly no parody of conventional courtship. Voice coaches Carol Fairlamb and Ben Furey seem to have had little input with her. And there should be comedy in the fact that Bottom announces at this point that he simply wants some hay and a nap.
Eve Ponsonby as Titania.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
It needs to be said that the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude is pulled off consummately with wit, imagination, stagecraft, and not a little smut relating to chinks and bushes. The section draws on the charisma and ad-libbing skills of comedian Munya Chawawa as Bottom. Costume designer Ryan Dawson Laight puts the mechanicals and their props in the exact shade of blue used in Conservative marketing materials at the time. Earlier, he has decked out the fairies in street-sports crossover garb with the burgeoning Adidas brand predominant.
The rave location is Kingley Vale, a piece of ancient yew woodland to the north-west of Chichester. A dozen real-life place names are mentioned, and each is greeted with gales of laughter, none more so than “the beached sea at Wittering”. It becomes tiresome. Could text consultant Giles Taylor not have realized that less is more? It’s my county. I was born and raised here. I have swum off West Wittering under the scrutiny of watchful lifeguards. The only time that the local references amused me was when Taylor manages wry mention of the other ghastly local acts that the Mechanicals have beaten off to have their play chosen. I simply didn’t buy into the full evening here and believe I gave it fair attention.
