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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Published Wednesday 15 September 2010 at 17:37 by Pat Ashworth

Shakespeare 4 Kidz reflect that they could have called themselves The Shakespeare Company for Children and Young People Who Want to Learn About Shakespeare and Be Entertained by His Stories in a Way That Everyone Can Enjoy or Understand.

Thankfully, they didn’t, but that’s precisely what their easy-to-understand musical adaptations do. This very entertaining and magical Dream played in Dubai in 2007 and will go to India, Singapore and the USA later next year after its extensive national tour.

It manages to marry sizeable and important chunks of Shakespeare’s text with robust, sometimes sentimental musical numbers like The Dream, Titania’s Lullaby and Bottom the Brave. Rash wantons are still instructed to tarry but there is modern language where appropriate and some very simple and effective ways for a young audience to remember who everyone is.

There’s a strong element of panto too, notably in the antics of Bottom, boisterously played by Sean Luckham. He refuses to die as Pyramus and does a lunatic eruption into the audience, who turn into groundlings and scream for his death. They don’t know what to make at first of Noel Andrew Harron’s nimble and outrageously camp Puck but they’re all clamouring to be his friends by the end of the show.

It’s clear and bright and fast-paced, with a strong cast, some in their first professional production. They dispense with all the Fairies but one, and deftly substitute sparkling trees for Grecian columns to create the wood outside Athens. It goes down a storm.