It’s difficult to imagine a more perfect theatrical experience than Petersfield Shakespeare Festival’s performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the sylvan setting of Wylds Farm.
Every detail was on the money, right from the start – attentive ushers, a makeshift bar and farmyard table seating for picnickers and a classy acoustic rock band.
And then an invitation from a Lord of Misrule character – later revealed as the brilliantly-cast David McCarthy as Puck – to pick up gaily-adorned staves and join in a procession up to the hill-top marquee seating for the play itself.
Puck, the fairy king’s chief troublemaker, is often played as an androgynous character. Here he’s a burly bloke with toybox fairy wings, yet he never becomes a pantomime character, more a pagan rabble-rouser straight from the beer tent at Beltain.
All the action happens appropriately in a real woodland glade. There’s no stage set and no props to speak of – just a few straw bales.
Sounds poncily minimalist, but it works perfectly, showing off the rich, imaginative costumes (especially Amy Allen’s Titania outfit, a psychedelic get-up channelling an Ab Fab Joanna Lumley) and allowing our imaginations – stimulated by a subtle musical score, dramatic mood-changing lighting in the trees and the actors’ expressive powers – to do the rest.
No element, no player, is out of kilter in this perfectly-judged, nicely-paced production.
There are no stars, no prima donnas, no self-indulgence: eight outstanding actors play all the parts with a freshness and vitality that never flags.
I liked Crispin Glancy’s Lysander’s wordless expressiveness as a thwarted lover in the opening scene; Twyla Doone’s coquettish tail-twirling as a lion performing to the King and Queen; Jon-Paul Rowden’s Bottom (ooh er, missus) out of his amorous depth when away with the fairies.
And the way Amy Allen (Hippolyta/Titania) and Albert de Jongh (Theseus/Oberon) transitioned between their alter egos in a scene towards the end was a wonderfully subtle thing, lifting the gauzy veils between ‘real’ and dream time.
Talking of gauzy veils, there wasn’t a mask in sight all evening.
You could almost imagine the pandemic had been a bad dream (though in a lovely touch, I understand 100 local NHS staff and volunteers involved in the vaccination programme were invited to the dress rehearsal).
At the play’s end, we were led down a fairy-lit path, with a big (and real, I think) orange moon low in the sky, to an orderly exit or disorderly drink at the cattle-shed bar, where I hope the actors, production team and creative geniuses behind this evening (director Chris Hollis, costume designer Nicole Small, technical director William Glancy and producers Clare Glancy and Lucy Hollis) were stood plenty – they deserved it. This was a wonderful, magical performance.
Richard Lomax