The play wraps everyone in interweaving dreams which discharge all the buried energy that’s causing love to create anarchy instead of order. The music of these dreams is some of Shakespeare’s most gorgeous poetry; Noble’s cast shapes this music with clarion clarity and rhythm. Alex Jennings as both Theseus and Oberon is like a tougher, unflustered Hugh Grant. The stunning Lindsay Duncan plays both Hippolyta and Titania with such simmering sensuality that some of her speeches seem to emit a sonic smoke. Puck, however, is a problem. This Robin Goodfellow, the satellite-speedy messenger of the fairy king, is played by the hunky Barry Lynch, who comes on as more of a con man than an imp of mischief, more Goodleila than Goodfellow.
Desmond Barrit as Bottom has the comic girth of Zero Mostel and some of his blustering pathos. When he awakens after having been turned into an ass and slept with the bewitched Titania, his forlorn face says he knows he’ll never again have an erotic experience like that. But those mechanicals and their theatrical capers are a problem. It’s getting harder and harder to make their shtik really funny. Maybe some directors should hire a John Cleese or a Robin Williams to stage that stuff, just as you have a choreographer to stage dances.
Anthony Ward’s set pours color into Peter Brook’s white crucible. His enchanted forest is a field of hanging upside-down glowworm lights and Magritte umbrellas. When the careering lovers (a quartet of young actors charged with Mack Sennett juice) at last fall asleep, they’re covered with wraps and lifted aloft. They hang there like love’s larvae, waiting to emerge purified from a chrysalis of dreams.
