A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream was the per­fect pick for Sum­mer Shakespeare, tra­di­tion­ally held in the Dell in Wel­ling­ton’s Botan­ic­al Gar­dens at night in the middle of sum­mer, but then the pro­duc­tion moved to the base­ment theatre at Te Whaea in New­town, and things pivoted from the usu­al. It was odd not to be sit­ting on scratchy dry grass, gradu­ally get­ting colder and colder in Wel­ling­ton’s night air as the show pro­gressed, and instead watch­ing from the front row of a rostrum in a con­crete base­ment, play­ers mere feet from my face, but it was a good time all the same.

‘Things pivot­ing from the usu­al’ is an apt descrip­tion for this iter­a­tion of A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream, dir­ec­ted by Shane Bosh­er, straight from anoth­er dir­ect­ing gig at Circa. With queer­ing of the story, con­sid­er­able amounts of neon, and many meta moments, it’s cer­tainly not your usu­al.

Auto­crat­ic and tyr­an­nic­al Duke of Athens, Theseus (Ham­ish Boyle), is get­ting ready for his polit­ic­ally con­veni­ent mar­riage to Queen of the Amazons, Hip­polyta (Sara Douglas), when their com­pany is inter­rup­ted by Egeus (Phil Pel­et­on), Her­mi­a’s fath­er, who demands that she marry Demet­ri­us (Mat­thew Staijen-Leach), a beloved sort, instead of the man she loves, Lysander (Andrew Clarke). Theseus presents Her­mia (Aimee Sul­li­van), with an impossible choice. She must either marry Demet­ri­us, or be put to death. Forced to flee into the woods, Her­mia and Lysander, as well as Demet­ri­us and Helen­us (Dryw McAr­thur) – who’s madly in love with Demet­ri­us already – run into some quar­rel­ling fair­ies, get dosed with an aph­ro­dis­i­ac, and really, the chaos starts there.

The fair­ies who live in the woods – Queen Ober­on (Grace Hoet) and Queen Titania (Cath­er­ine Zul­ver) – are squab­bling over trivi­al mat­ters. Ober­on seeks revenge by send­ing her delight­ful hench­fairy Puck (Ariadne Baltaz­ar) to fetch the afore­men­tioned aph­ro­dis­i­ac and drip it in Titani­a’s eyes when she sleeps, con­found­ing her to fall in love with the first thing she sees when she wakes.

On the oth­er side of the woods, a group of Mech­an­ic­als are try­ing to put on a play suit­able for Theseus and Hip­poly­ta’s wed­ding. It does­n’t go espe­cially well. More on that later.

What imme­di­ately strikes me about this per­form­ance is the sheer sense of fun it has. The char­ac­ters leap from the page, blaz­ing bright in front of our eyes, and the energy from the per­formers does­n’t let up for the couple of hours we’re in the space. I espe­cially enjoyed the phys­ic­al­ity of the fight scenes – the pivotal con­front­a­tion between Helen­us, Her­mia, Demet­ri­us and Lysander being a par­tic­u­lar favour­ite – where all four per­formers enact incred­ible com­plic­ated cho­reo­graphy and throw their entire selves (quite lit­er­ally) into it.

The set­ting is mod­ern, a under­ground club per­haps, and while I would have loved to have seen this play staged out­doors, the vibe makes sense. In the city, all kinds of col­our­ful weird­ness goes down in the wee small hours of night, after all, and in the intim­acy of this theatre, we feel a part of the action.

While I found immense enjoy­ment in watch­ing this show and all those who per­formed with­in it, I’d like to make a spe­cial men­tion of the Mech­an­ic­als. The offi­cious Petra Quince (Char­lotte Dodd), over­in­flated Bot­tom (James Bayliss), bash­ful Snug (Dav­id Bowers-Mason), spir­ited Flute (Jake Brown), and like­able Snout (Lucy McCarthy) and Starveling (Rose­mary Lewis) bring so much joy to the piece, play­ing their roles with a recog­nis­able am-dram charm. We’ve all been there. The Mech­an­ic­als might­n’t be nat­ur­al-born per­formers, but they’re damn well going to give it a good go, and their per­form­ance of Pyra­mus and Thisbe at the end of the show is over-enthu­si­ast­ic and full of hil­ar­ity, cul­min­at­ing in an epic death scene, com­plete with ‘dag­gers’ and water guns.

Those in love in this play, for the most part, have good chem­istry, and I do appre­ci­ate the cast­ing of Dryw McAr­thur as a male Helen­us (as opposed to Helena, from the ori­gin­al script), and Grace Hoet as a female Ober­on. Queer­ing a play like this works incred­ibly well, and allows for a more mod­ern explor­a­tion of some of the rela­tion­ships, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the set­ting.

I do won­der a little about the cross-cast­ing of Helen­us (Helena), how­ever. McAr­thur’s play­ing of Helen­us is very strong, quick-wit­ted and clev­er, and he’s incred­ibly enjoy­able to watch, but I do still won­der about the cross-cast­ing.

It’s an inter­est­ing choice when so few women in this play­ing hit the mark find­ing the autonomy they so clearly seek – Theseus clearly holds the power in Athens over Hip­polyta (des­pite her being the Queen of the Amazons, come on), and the sheer amount of male lov­ers draw the eye often more so than Her­mia – that it feels a little bit unfor­tu­nate to lose such a strong-willed woman from the text. How­ever, I sup­pose the inclu­sion of a female Ober­on and a female Quince did help bal­ance the piece out some­what. The cross-cast­ing, and the sub­sequent queer­ing of the piece helps the play find the mod­ern­ity it needs, and for the most part, I did appre­ci­ate it.

What wor­ries me about the play­ing of this piece is the con­fu­sion around con­sent. Per­haps Demet­ri­us’ infatu­ation with Helen­us at the end of the play would have been fine at the time of writ­ing, but think­ing of it these days leaves a an unsa­vory taste in the mouth. Near the end of the play, Puck removes the love potion from Lysander, so he’ll only care for Her­mia once again. Puck does­n’t, how­ever, remove the potion from Demet­ri­us – as is true in the ori­gin­al text – and Demet­ri­us and Helen­us get mar­ried, with Demet­ri­us’ infatu­ation with Helen­us seem­ingly only driv­en by the potion he’s under. This isn’t ideal for our mod­ern stage, and it is espe­cially not ideal with the queer­ing of this rela­tion­ship. Is Demet­ri­us bisexu­al, or is his love for Helen­us only drawn from the potion? Does he truly care for him, or is it just coer­cion? Does this rela­tion­ship work bey­ond the pages of the script?

Per­haps this was the dir­ect­or’s inten­tion – Dream does fea­ture a spec­trum of depic­tions of love/“love” – from the unyield­ing, unbreak­able bond Her­mia and Lysander have, to the bit­ter-tast­ing thing that has Theseus and Hip­polyta – it could be a meta take. How­ever,  it reads uncom­fort­ably, and could have eas­ily be remedied with tiny alter­a­tions to the script, or dif­fer­ent non-verbal play­ing of the rela­tion­ship between the char­ac­ters. Helen­us says, “The more I love, the more he hat­eth me,” and was Demet­ri­us of sound mind and will, it seems like that’d still be true at the end of the piece.

A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream is a glor­i­ous cel­eb­ra­tion of one of Shakespeare’s great com­ed­ies – blend­ing meta, mod­ern­ity and music with the glit­ter and glam of a night out. It’s well worth a watch, if you can stom­ach the uncom­fort­able moments that occa­sion­ally crop up.