A Midsummer Night’s Dream

With the sylvan glades of Surrey out of bounds for theatrical merrymaking, Guildford Shakespeare Company has joined forces with Bolton’s Octagon Theatre to produce a live-streamed A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as the September chill begins to set in.

Based on her 2017 production for GSC, Octagon artistic director Lotte Wakeham has assembled a cast of six performing from their own homes, who pull off a sequence of extraordinary back-and-forth quick changes.

Performed against the heightened artifice of Beth Mann’s whimsical virtual backgrounds, the production is somewhat lacking in a concept aside from a move from Athens to the town of ‘Guildbolt’. The switching between each cast member’s webcam is briskly efficient though on the manic side without much of an opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the language.

Emma Fenney is a charming Puck, who acts as a narrator like a pantomime good fairy and encourages very mild audience participation – practising a royal wave or flapping our ‘wings’ to travel between locations – and she also makes an engaging Hermia. Matt Pinches’ Bottom is rather subdued and the smaller roles often make a stronger impact than the principals, including Sarah Gobran as the long-suffering Mrs Quince and Misha Duncan-Barry’s stage-shy Snug the cleaner.

Among the inevitable spate of monologues in recent months, it’s refreshing to see an ensemble work together in spite of the limitations of physical distance, and serves as a reminder that comedy, particularly without live audience feedback, is the hardest genre of all.