David Knapman's design is poised between Victorian primness and Edwardian loucheness. Claire Carrie's Hermia is a feisty foil to Issy Van Randwych's delectable Helena, a skittering diseuse in peach-coloured garb, reduced to stays and bloomers in the magic forest. Their beaux, Chook Sibtain's bendy Lysander and Michael Higgs's straight-backed Demetrius, are fast and furious. Titania's demonic fairies are robust sprites, John Padden a Pan-like fizzing Puck. Rob Edwards and Serena Evans as Oberon and Titania will be fine when they stop acting in their great speeches.
All mysteries coalesce as the tall trees sway and tiny illuminations pierce the dark night.
A Midsummer Night's Dream seems custom-built for this space, operating as it does in a sort of dramatic twilight, by turns craving derision and sympathy for men and women who, in their own different ways, make complete asses of themselves. If Rachel Kavanaugh's debut New Shakespeare mainstage production has a fault, it is that it doesn't always strike this balance. It's hardly surprising that the two young women, who bear the emotional brunt of the flower-crazed affections in the forest, seem to take things so lightly. But it would be churlish to find too much fault in a staging that goes in such exuberant pursuit of comedy - and sexual chemistry. Having sat through productions that made me question whether Dream wasn't written just to prove that the English can never let their hair down, even at their midsummer maddest, it's refreshing to see such abandonment to the god of gag.