Independent Minds
I shouldn’t have worried. Unfolding on the lozenge-shaped open stage of the Rose Theatre at Kingston, Hall’s latest production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is exquisitely well judged in its light-footed, lucid, poetically persuasive, wonderfully funny and brilliantly well-spoken way. The idea is that Dench is Elizabeth I who evidently fancies moonlighting as the Queen of the Fairies in addition to her capacity as Queen of England. In a short wordless prequel, she sweeps into a room where the Elizabethan actors are preparing, snatches up a part-script and signals that the performance proper may begin.
It must be marvellous for the younger members of this great company to have such a great speaker of verse to emulate. Dench can send a thrill of wonder through a line of Shakespeare like wind rippling through a field of wheat. And indeed a respect for uncynical wonder is one of the, so to say, Hall-marks of this production in which Julian Wadham gives a lovely mandarin wit and weight to Theseus’s doctrine that the guileless endeavour of the rude mechanicals (a terrific Brummie Crazy Gang of idiosyncratic physical types here) is not something to sneer at.
Oliver Chris is comic perfection as Bottom. He’s young and he has the looks that could make him a leading man (very far from always the case in the casting of this role) and he’s adorable in his fresh-faced keenness.
When he comes round from his dream, this Bottom has a panicky rummage in his cod-piece and crosses himself in relief that the equipment is still there and of the previous dimensions. Not that you feel that there has been much hanky panky in that department with Dench’s Titania. The Queen’s doting on this donkey is more at the girlish devotion to My Little Pony end of the spectrum than the cross-species carnality you get in some productions. She hugs him tight as one might want to embrace, say, Lassie.
