Lyric Hammersmith and Filter Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a blend of hilarity and uncertainty which leaves the audience questioning their own reality. With brilliant and imperceptible trickery, Lyric-Filter blur the lines between audience and performance, so that by the time we realise that the man on stage spouting topical one-liners about Brighton is in fact Peter Quince, the lead mechanical in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the space between us and the play no longer exists. George Fouracres’ Peter Quince flits between stand-up comedian and straight-faced cast member as he comes onstage to ‘apologise’, because, due to a technical hitch, the show can’t go on (of course it does). This last part, which includes the theatre lights coming on and promises of a refund, is interesting in its power play. The play’s plot – fairies mix with four Athenian lovers and incite a magical confusion of who loves whom – starts to encroach on us as we sit, bewildered, unsure if we should laugh or leave.
Director, Sean Holmes, and composers and sound designers, Chris Branch and Tom Haines deserve credit for the eclectic and powerful relationship between sound and humour in this production of Dream. The mechanicals, who are interchangeable with members of a live band, exchange insouciant banter and contemporary versions of their lines (David Ganly’s Bottom, when told he will play the part of Pyramus, asks, 'is he a lover, or an evil lad, or what?'), which relaxes us into thinking of the performance itself as an exaggerated joke. Yet, the brilliance of a humour which refers to Peaky Blinders in a Shakespearean play, is that it uncoils the clichés of Athenian dress, fairy wings and wildflowers which we have come to associate, perhaps a little tritely, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When the magic evolves, it does so only with sound: electric cracks, beeps and high, strange voices, which, against the play’s disarming humour, manifests as an intense, displaced and eerie power. Allyson Ava-Brown as Titania is discerningly sensitive to the oneness of sound and magic in this production, her voice expressing genuine and frightening otherworldliness against background tones of raw and jangling music, as she soliloquises about the Indian boy in her care.
Kayla Meikle, as Puck, and Harry Jardine, as Oberon, pulse vibrantly and hilariously through the play. Jardine, decked out in a blue superhero suit and with a stance reminiscent of Lord Farquaad, elicits constant laughs with his ability to channel both a petulant boy-man rage, complete with puce face and hammering fists, and an inflated sense of his own coolness. Kayla Meikle is masterful as Puck, exchanging traditional impish flitting with a grinning and powerful stance as she circles the stage with her in-a-can love potion. This is a brilliant production, with a combination of humour and eerie control that makes it a must-see.
