Silly Shakespeare is an anarchic treat

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Royal Exchange, Manchester

FILTER Theatre Company and the Lyric Hammersmith give the Exchange its first non in-house spring term comedy, and the result can generally be thought a comic triumph.

Well, if you think you don’t like Shakespeare, that is.

Purists among you should turn away from the theatre door and keep walking, if only to spare us their holier-than-this bleating that will follow.

Filter’s “MND”, for all its cleverness and subversive handling of the poet’s text, is the Top Gear Shakespeare: the TV show is about three guys mucking about and occasionally talking about cars, and this is a terrific cast of 10 (plus a mystery guest as Bottom) mucking about and occasionally steering wildly in and out of the plot of the play.

Not that it matters much: this is Shakespeare with a large machete taken to it — so large, in fact, that without knowledge of the play you might find it difficult to follow.

The missing chunks have been replaced by, well, shopping from Sainsbury’s, a food fight, a last-minute, stand-in Bottom (the actor-knight booked being stuck in a lift on the way from the dressing room, sadly), a couple of disconcertingly funny male-to-male kisses, a tent, an asthmatic Oberon who thinks he is Superman (with cape and costume), a Puck not airy and ephemeral but a stagehand in big boots, lots of clever little sound effects and a bit of singing — Barry White or du-wop style, naturally.

And that’s just a few bits of the silliness forced into the evening. So thick and fast are the ideas that when we get to the more obvious Shakespearean lines they can sound a bit dull by comparison.

The evening opens on our director for the play-in-play comedy, Quince, introducing what is to come (105 interval-free minutes) with a sort of stand-up routine referencing the homosexual sub-culture of ancient Greece and of modern Brighton, among other things.

This garrulous Irishman (the brilliant Ed Gaughan) also mentions the crushing disappointment we will feel at the final curtain that we didn’t go to the pictures instead.

No such fear: the show has been touring for a while and seems both anarchically under-rehearsed (apparently a company badge of honour) and at the same time drilled to within an inch of its life. There’s a lot going on and it’s mostly very funny. And on that bombshell...





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