Bell Shakespeare‘s annual touring show is a theatre lover’s treat that promises to deliver classic Shakes with ingenuity, imagination, spectacle, and modern perspectives. This year, they’re taking Shakespeare’s best-known comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream to audiences around Australia, but director Peter Evans has made some artistic choices that have watered down the fantasy-comedy in favour of a moody, gothy, The Lost Boys vibe.

The show’s dazzling opener swiftly introduced us to Evans’s stylistic emphasis on physicality in this version of Midsummer. As the mechanicals began delivering their lines, Evans’s directorial POV became more clear – we’re to take these characters seriously as ‘real’ people. Almost no one played their lines for laughs (save, perhaps, Matu Ngaropo as Bottom), the performers’ character development seemed to be mostly internal, and they barely played off each other.

This continued right through the entirety of the play; the young lovers (Ahunim Abebe, Isabel Burton, Mike Howlett, and Laurence Young) delivered their lines very prettily, with clarity, and lots of accompanying gesture. But they couldn’t quite get away from recitation and presentational emotion and move more fully into naturalism and nuance. Their scenes suffered from a lack of dynamics – once they started off the mark, it was all 100 right the way through.

The fairies entered the story dressed in black (a literal take on ‘shadows’ perhaps), hanging around the set’s rafters like 80s vampires who’ve just transformed from bats. They offer little in the way of mirth, fun, or frivolity, but it seems that Evans has decided it’s neither the time nor place for that. This is serious business, this comedy stuff.

Even Bottom’s transformation is nowhere near as asinine as it usually is and should be – in fact, when he dons his mask, he looks more like Frank, the rabbit from Donnie Darko, than a donkey. The costume design (Teresa Negroponte) is dull and even wintry, in spite of the show’s title, and tells an incoherent, unmoored visual story. Hermia and Helena look like they got dressed in the dark to avoid discovery before escaping to the forest. Beige heeled boots are completely inappropriate for running into the woods, much less being paired with a bronze satin mid-length dress.

When we finally get to the final act’s Pyramus and Thisbe, it’s as if the spell of sobriety and sincerity has been lifted, and the actors finally get time and space to ham it up. They’re given too much leeway though; the comedy in this scene needs quick pick-ups, surprise, and deft pacing, but Evans gives us sluggish, laboured gags. The performers mug and pose, then wait for us to offer up a chuckle before moving on to the next bit.

So, if Evans’s goal was to play entirely against type at every single turn with this production, then he’s certainly pulled off this amazingly puzzling feat. Not even Puck could get it this wrong. I can forgive the shadows, but I can’t forgive Evans for this joyless, mannered, midwinter’s rendition of Midsummer.

CICELY BINFORD

A Midsummer Night’s Dream ran at the Heath Ledger Theatre from 16 – 20 April 2024. For more information and other dates on the tour, visit here.