This production is a fundraiser to bring back the University of Auckland’s Outdoor Summer Shakespeare. Director Patrick Graham (also responsible for Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, 2007 and The Comedy of Errors, 2006) has attempted, as many have done before, to make Shakespeare interesting and accessible to a young audience, and for the most part he’s successful. For a start, it’s pared down to a comfortable 90 minutes – losing none of its action and a lot of its long-winded, meandering speeches. 

I have seen more A Midsummer Night’s Dream productions than any other Shakespeare play, and yet it is one of my least favourite, mainly because of its self-excused ‘weak and idle theme’ which really is ‘no more yielding but a dream’. This version succeeds in that it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything else.

Instead of going for pathos and sincerity, the lovers’ knot is portrayed as the farce that it is, and has never been funnier, with Lysander and Demetrius’ lewd pawings and the women’s incredulous tantrums bringing down the house.

Where the otherwise humorous physicality of the play doesn’t work is when it becomes too slapstick: the goofiness of the fairies seems to be aimed at primary school kids. Although I can understand wanting to get away from the dainty, pretty, insubstantial fairy tradition, this interpretation with its fluffy pink hats, vacant grins and clumsy bearing doesn’t really do it for me either.

On the other hand, Bottom and the other ‘mechanicals’ (played by the same actors as the fairies and with the same buffoonery) do master the slapstick element, as they are supposed to – simple tradesmen hamming it up for the celebrations of their Duke’s wedding day. Given the naughty/modern tone of the play, though, and its gender blurring, several opportunities for comic innuendo are missed in translation.

Hanna Craven – a woman playing a man playing a woman (Flute/Thisby) – does a convincing falsetto and, aside from Puck, is also the least tedious fairy, playing the cheeky, flouncy Moth. 

Paul Letham is amusing both as the self-important but completely gormless Theseus and the campy, treacherous Oberon. Puck, always a favourite, is Oberon’s gothic-camp toyboy, played to mischievous perfection by a nimble Jack Seabrook.

Catherine McHattie plays Titania and Hyppolyta. Quietly domineering, she definitely wears the pants, both as the Oberon’s fairy queen and Theseus’ Amazonian wife-to-be.

A minimal, static set with nothing to even faintly suggest a forest means you have to use your imagination. Painted spirals on the wall and floor give it a very stylised sense of depth, which also fits with the feel of the play – it’s more concerned with the physicality of the characters and their interpersonal flaws than with aesthetics or themes of magic and dreams. 

Going to a student production of such perennial Shakespeare might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but this an unpretentious and watchable rendition with a reasonable dash of charm. 

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