Yes, you really can go Globe-trotting again!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Verdict: The Bard is back ★★★✩✩ Shaw Shorts (Orange Tree, Richmond)
Verdict: Cheaters never prosper ★★★★✩
WE CAN only admire the way that Shakespeare brushes off pandemic shutdowns like crumbs from his doublet. First, a couple of bubonic plagues; then, a round of Covid.
The Globe re-opened this week with a revival of Sean Holmes’s psychedelic 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in social-distancing terms, it felt at first like watching a cricket match on the village green. The theatre’s concrete pit is staked out with chairs, arranged carefully on markings for legs. Whole rows in the galleries are taped off. There are no drinks, no programmes, no interval — and no cushions to spare posteriors from the pitiless benches.
Despite these privations, we the people did manage to drum up some atmosphere. And, to be honest, Holmes’s eventually boisterous production did need help to warm up before Jean Chan’s stage design set the show ablaze, with eye-scorching costumes for the fairies in the forest.
Their king, Oberon (Peter Bourke), appears in a huge yellow, sequin-encrusted scallop shell, sporting a turquoise Elvis wig.
His Fairy Queen, Titania (Victoria Elliott), flies in on a tasselled e-scooter, looking like a cross between a drag queen and Dolly Parton circa 1975.
FOr reasons unknown, she lives in a flower-bedecked wheelie bin, and her followers are a gang of tuttifrutti mummers in pointy hats. Together with a blaring brass band, this all sets up a carnivalesque atmosphere. But the big loser in the costume stakes is Bottom (Sophie russell). When the benighted weaver is turned into a donkey, russell appears in an NHS rainbow body suit, looking like a Mexican piñata.
There is no sign of long, furry ears; and what little power the costume has is lost when russell removes the muzzle to be heard.
I’d also have preferred it if noise and spectacle hadn’t drowned out verse and action.
Even so, the lovers create fireworks in the forest. Nadi KempSayfi fizzes as Hermia, Shona Babayemi harrumphs happily as Helena, Ciaran O’Brien enjoys explosive hyperbole as Demetrius, and Bryan Dick smoulders nicely as Lysander.
There is some confusion caused by mischief-maker Puck being played by multiple actors. But his four-letter name is stencilled on their T-shirts to help us out. n NOr DOES the course of true love run smooth in Shaw Shorts — a double bill of one-act plays by George Bernard Shaw, now running in richmond. South-West London. The first (How He Lied To Her Husband) is about a glamorous young woman whose poems from her lover have fallen into the hands of her husband.
The second (Overruled) is about two married couples who are having affairs with their opposite numbers. Shaw takes mischievous delight in the way his characters tie themselves in knots as they assert, renounce and reaffirm their romantic illusions.
Naturally, there are finely calibrated Shavian aperçus, such as ‘nothing brings people to their senses like hunger’ or ‘my intentions are honourable, but my conduct is terrible’. And some great put-downs: ‘Don’t swear in my presence — you would think you were my husband!’
Paul Miller’s neatly tailored production, centred on an upholstered bench in the middle of a socially-distanced audience, seeks to bring the plays into the modern world with chic costumes mixing cummerbunds and jeans.
Yet the nearest thing we have to the respectability the characters debate is political correctness. And besides, I love both plays as antiques.
There are nice turns from Alex Bhat as an arch and oily lover, Jordan Mifsud as an indignant husband, Hara Yannas as an impatient wife — and Dorothea Myer-Bennett as a free-thinking lovetigress in a fabulous red velvet jumpsuit. n SHAw Shorts will be live streamed at 7.30pm on June 3 and 4 (orangetree theatre.co.uk).