Culture on the Doorstep

Titania and Bottom
in Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe Theatre
on screen

Everyone in the audience enjoyed this performance of Shakespeare’s battle of the sexes. The woman sitting right behind me enjoyed it so much that she tittered and sniggered and giggled at every innuendo and visual gag, often before they were fully born. Shakespeare’s comedy play is peopled with confusing and confused characters, mortals and spirits, a secret night-time forest, magic potions, a band of amateur actors, the Rude Mechanicals, performing a play within a play, who brought the house down every time they appeared, and the darkly mischievous world of Oberon and Titania with Puck and a band of faeries. It’s great fun - unless you are bored by the unlikely story, like Beloved said he has been every time I’ve forced him to see the play. Even he laughed during the second act, but only were laughter was appropriate. The woman sitting behind me drove me to distraction and I frequently braced myself for her next onslaught. 

Unfortunately, I mentioned my irritation to the friends we had come with. We half-heartedly wondered if we should move, but that would have been excessive. I should have kept my complaint to myself, in the interval I saw them stand with the giggler and her husband, having a conversation. Only then did I recognise her as a Valley’s End inhabitant who is a leading light in the Amateur Dramatic Society.

So often nowadays directors feel they need to freshen an old play by dragging it into a more recent century. It so rarely works. This production stayed firmly where it was meant to be, in a magical, unreal Elizabethan world with a fictitious Athens at the centre; the actors were dressed in the most astonishingly beautiful costumes, even the ones who were semi naked.

I am enormously glad that the National Theatre and now the RSC at Stratford and Shakespeare’s Globe in London transmit so many of their productions digitally. You can see the whole of the action clearly, hear every word and see the acting up close and doubled in size. Although I love it when we go to live performances in actual theatres, with their noise and buzz and the smell of backstage, I am very happy not to be driving for hours and paying high ticket prices every time.