A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2016: Emma Rice

Another reworked version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Globe, even more vapid and impertinent than the 2014 Dromgoole version, if that’s possible. The original conceit of the Globe as a theater where Shakespeare’s plays could be presented in something like their original form is certainly nowhere in view. This is instead conceived as a fusion of Bollywood musicals and burlesque; it’s all about unfettered sexuality, silliness, fast referential humor, and in general a contempt for the dramatic material it presumes to celebrate. It’s no longer at all about Shakespeare’s play. Puck is a self-absorbed hipster girl who twitches and shouts her way through everything while braying laughter at her own bellowed jokes and cutesy voices. Roles are gender-swapped mostly fairly arbitrarily; the music is chiefly jazz sitar and drums, the lines butchered and rewritten, songs inserted to project a different message from Shakespeare’s.

Even when the occasional line of Shakespeare makes it through unmangled, it’s so devoid of rational context as to be useless. If what you want to see is Titania gesticulating in fishnet stockings, Bottom playing the banjo, Hermia and Lysander graphically making out while protesting their virtue, and a same-sex liaison between Helenus and Demetrius (and Helenus and Lysander in the middle), accompanied by lines borrowed indifferently from John Donne and the Die Hard movies, with an intruded “I’m Spartacus!”, all packed in a general exhibition of prat falls, genital gesticulation, a Jack Kerouac tee-shirt, and embarrassed giggles, this is the production for you. It was Emma Rice’s first production as artistic director at the Globe; she left the Globe in 2018 amid a storm of more or less predictable acrimony. She defended her work on the grounds of preserving the integrity of her process. I can’t comment on her process, good or bad; I don’t really care about it, either. Her process is her own business. Of the end product, however, I cannot say anything that looks like praise. For my money, the Dromgoole version is bad because it’s shallow and reductive, but it’s not this aggressively chaotic and malevolent. This was apparently quite successful during its run: what that says about the play-going public is left as an exercise for the reader: the production is glitzy, arch, and vulgar exhibitionism optimized for an attention-deficit audience lacking either historical or literary sense.

It’s unfortunate that the Globe has not released at least one version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that respects the original form the play. This certainly doesn’t. I watched it all the way through so you don’t have to.

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