Until now, the Jesus College Project has been strolling in the foothills of Shakespeare. With the exception of Romeo and Juliet the works they've so far given us have been rarer mounted plays like Henry the Sixth Part Two and Titus Andronicus. With A Midsummer Night's Dream the stakes are raised. Not a summer passes without the gardens of stately homes and Oxford Colleges being awash with rampant fairies and translated Bottoms. Against competition like that, can Peter Sutton and his dedicated, ever-evolving company of actors keep up their astonishing record of mesmerising productions? Will this be a dream of a show or a Midsummer murder?
Why would you even worry?
Without a tree in sight, in a bare room illuminated by domestic ceiling lights, without wings (neither of the fairy nor stage-side variety), without even, frankly, a stage, this show creates a kind of magic rarely seen in more lavish productions. It's a magic that comes not from special effects, but from an intelligent, original, refreshing interpretation of the script that is founded, above all, in love.
So what's different? Well, let's start with Theseus and Hippolyta. It's become almost de rigueur to double these parts up with Oberon and Titania. That may make sense if you want to save money on actors' salaries, but in an amateur production it's normally a kneejerk decision, designed to suggest that the fairy world is some kind of inverted reality of the human one. In Sutton's production they are distinct roles, and this frees them up to be wildly different and memorably individual. Tom Pavey's Theseus is a lascivious upper-class twit, keen to paper over everyone's problems and jolly things along. With his forced bonhommie and hand-wringing he is like a reincarnated Leonard Rossiter. By contrast, Rowan Brown as Oberon is poised, calculating, meddlesome. Esther O'Neill as Hippolyta is as taciturn and grumpy as you'd expect a captured bride to be (there's one wonderful moment when she storms out of the room without replying to Theseus and he scurries after her, arms flailing in apology), while Titania, played by Kitty Brown, is statuesque, measured and poetic.
But the separation of supernatural and human worlds is more than just a casting decision here. The Athenians are living in 2025, supplied with phones and modern clothes (there's a great moment when Carys Howell's Starveling, running in terror, says into her handset, 'Mum, come and get me'). By contrast, the fairies are in period costume, like 18th-century aristocrats, not sprites of Nature. They feel like creatures of the past, in touch with centuries of heritage, rather than forest pixies, and their interference with the modern world is not predictably mischievous but earnest and misguided.
And what about the young lovers? Katie Maybin, Elouise Wills, Hugh Linklater and Tom Onslow fizz with youthful infatuation. They are also absolutely hilarious, careening between extremes of passion at the shake of a magic flower. Linklater and Onslow played Dumaine and Longaville in last winter's Love's Labour's Lost, and they build on the comic lover foundations they planted then. It's especially fun to see them finding the humour in the lines themselves, rather than added bits of business. When Lysander says, 'Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold her visage in the watery glass', he's not just using that image because Shakespeare is a poet. He's using it because Lysander wants to be one too, and in his mouth it sounds like puppyish exaggeration.
(Also, every single time one of the lovers enters the stage they trip over an imaginary tree root. It's slapstick. And it works.)
With all these groups of characters being subtly but effectively reinvented, what could possibly happen to the Mechanicals? Usually they are a bunch of semi-literate artisans who flounder their way to their own hilariously bad play. This production reframes them as genuinely committed am-dram enthusiasts. Bottom in particular, played to preening perfection by David Ingham, is no blustering yokel but a self-proclaimed artist. He speaks with affected haughtiness, and he nearly walks out of the show in a diva-style tantrum when he doesn't get the lion role. Peter Quince, played by Tom Allen (a man with more on-stage Shakespeare experience than most professional actors), comes across as a pretty effective director too: practical, diplomatic and dedicated. In another supreme comedy moment he collapses in a dead faint at the news that his play has been preferred, and the rest of the cast have to bring him round. Like everything in this Dream, it's an original idea that still manages to work perfectly with the text.
Connecting all these groups of characters is Arthur Bellamy's Puck. He starts the play working as a barman, serving beer to Bottom and his colleagues. And as the action shifts to the forest, he switches, before our eyes, into the archaic finery of the other fairies. But Bellamy is no merry wanderer of the night. This Puck is scowling, frustrated, even angry. He is less a colleague and more a captive of Oberon, an early study for Ariel, yearning for release from the petty whims of the Fairy King. He gives the play an undercurrent of danger which suits with it - a living symbol for the arbitrary and meretricious power of love and infatuation.
And ultimately that's what I left feeling this play is about: the superficiality of love when it's based on no more than outward appearance. Oberon's flower tips its magic spores into the eye, not the heart. And his victims fall for the wrong people (and the wrong donkeys) because they see beauty, not because they feel love.
The climax of this production comes in what is usually its most troublesome moment. Of all the lovers, only Demetrius ends the play still enchanted, doomed to a lifetime of artificially-induced adoration of Helena. But his speech of reconciliation, so often a robotic bit of pat romantic twaddle, here feels like the heart of the whole show. The night is over, and they have but slumbered there. Dawn brings truth, and when he says of his feeling for Helena, 'But, as in health come to my natural taste, Now I do wish it, love it, long for it, And will for evermore be true to it,' that's not the magic speaking. It's a realisation of a deep and meaningful bond.
It comes as no surprise that the final play-within-a-play is effortlessly uproarious. I don't think I've ever seen the line 'I kiss the wall's hole' so bawdily realised before, as Pyramus and Thisbe attempt to kiss between Snout's splayed legs. And having all the characters, both lovers and mechanicals, join in the Bergomask dance at the end is a fitting finish to a party of a production. (There was also a touchingly appropriate reference to the JCSP's own recent staging of Romeo and Juliet, with Pyramus and Thisbe's deaths using the same tables and blocking - and even one of the same actors. An Easter egg for the regulars.)
This production finds that rarest of things: the narrow path through the woods between innovation and tradition. A Midsummer Night's Dream has always been there. But tonight it felt like it had just been written.