A Midsummer Night's Dream @ Assembly George Square

Starting in a school detention, the idea was promising and the teacher, who later becomes Puck, gave the best performance of the whole play. The transition from school children reading to real costumed action was a little too quick to live up to the full potential of the idea.

The main tale of the lovers, although not sidelined in the action, fell to the side simply by the much poorer acting given during those scenes. It seems that in the effort to make the fairy scenes seem magical and the comical scenes comic, the cast had forgotten to focus on the central scenes. There’s so much going on in any Shakespeare production, you have to be able to pull focus to the central plot and this cast just didn’t quite pull it off. Instead, next to the incredibly well performed Puck and the more elaborate comic scenes, the main lovers seemed pathetic and petty. 

If the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had stuck simply to performing the renowned play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe, it would have been a fantastic show. However, the effort put into creating the tragic    comedy of two lovers, a lion and a wall was not there throughout much of the main plot. 

The setting was pretty, the fast costume changes impressive and the ending performance amusing, but overall the show didn’t quite step up to the mark of so many other Midsummer Night’s Dreams before it.