“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” can be many things. There are earthy “Dreams,” airy “Dreams,” saucy “Dreams” and sweet “Dreams.” It’s Shakesp…
— and, indeed, his Athens is immediately comprehensible: an ultra-patriarchal system, men in sharp suits, women in cloth bonnets, very “Handmaid’s Tale.” Oliver Chris’s sternly imperious king keeps his bride-to-be in a box: Christie’s seething Hippolyta is the spoils of war. It’s a world where fathers select their sons-in-law and women are reduced to property. Little wonder that, having pushed back, Isis Hainsworth’s headstrong Hermia elopes with her preferred husband-to-be.
Puck’s flower-power upsets the balance. If, ordinarily, Athens’ men are in control, they lose it entirely when completely loved-up. Kit Young’s Lysander loses all his leather-jacketed swagger for prostrate subservience; Paul Adeyefa ditches his detachment in a fit of pie-eyed swooning. Indeed, the second Puck pushes his petals their way, the two men lock eyes, then lips: they hold no sway over their own desires.
The root cause is that Hytner’s staging pulls two ways at once, part play and part party. The first asks us to invest in its fiction; the second wants us present in the room, and its impulse is to crowdplease at the expense of the script. There are a slew of anachronistic comic asides, mugging Mechanicals, singalong numbers and circus acts that don’t come close to mustering either spectacle or festival spirit.
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