There’s a fine line between “visionary reinterpretation” and “group therapy session gone off the rails,” and the Fitzrovia Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream pole-vaulted over that line and landed in a steaming puddle of theatrical delusion.
Let’s be clear: I did not attend this play so much as I survived it.
This production,directed by Cedric Vineshadow, who insists on being credited as a “story alchemist”,transports Shakespeare’s whimsical romp from a magical Athenian forest to atrendycaféinShoreditch. The fairies are “freelance branding consultants,” Oberon is a shirtless life coach with a ring light, and Titania enters to the sound of Tibetan throat singing followed by a live goat on a leash. That’s not a joke. There was a goat. It defecated during Act III, which, in hindsight, was the most honest reaction to the show.
Puck, usually a mischievous sprite, was played here by three people in morph suits who communicated rather too much by twerking. Their “mischief” included spraying audience members with essential oils and stealing people’s bags and other items. I had slipped off my shoes; at the end it took 20 minutes to locate them – Puck had hidden them in a prop bin. Not funny.
The lovers,Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius,were each portrayed as emotionally repressed investment bankers trapped in a never-ending escape room. Their romantic confusion was acted out through a complex system of traffic cones and blindfolds. Few lines were delivered without being followed by a beatbox solo or an inexplicable slow-motion interpretive gesture. The play became less about love and more about my desperate yearning for a fire alarm to go off.
Bottom, traditionally a lovable oaf, was reimagined as a YouTube prankster with a man bun and a vape. His transformation into an ass was, apparently, too literal for this bold new vision, so instead he became a “walking metaphor for performative masculinity,” which is to say, he wore a giant phallic foam hat and screamed every line like he was trying to order a kebab from across the street.
The Mechanicals’ play within the play,usually a charming comedic highlight,was replaced with a live Zoom call to a confused man in Cincinnati who had clearly been tricked into participating. He valiantly attempted to play “Pyramus” while someone in the audience held a laptop up to the stage like it was a hostage negotiation. It was avant-garde in the same way a gas leak is avant-garde.
Costumes appeared to have been sourced from the bins behind a failed Burning Man pop-up store. Lighting was “experimental,” meaning most scenes were lit only by handheld flashlights operated by unpaid interns. The sound design consisted almost entirely of didgeridoos.
At the end, the cast all gathered in a circle, held hands with the front row, and chanted “We are the dream” twelve times while staring into the middle distance. Then the curtain fell, right on one lady’s head.
One star. And that’s solely because the goat tried its best.
