A Midsumer Night’s Dream @ The Pleasance

If you read Shakespeare’s works frequently then walking straight into the Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsumer Night’s Dream will be an unblinkingly indifferent experience - the play’s words will flow, and the whole performance will be as quintessentially beautiful as its cast. If however, it has been a while since you read the master’s works, it’s almost guaranteed that the first few scenes will fly over your head.

The cast’s quick-fire ability to talk in breathless and helpless tongues of beautifully crafted sentences does however place merit on their bare naked talent, memory, diction, and ability to selflessly prove that passion can never be misspent.

It is often said that talking to yourself is the best conversation you can ever have, and if Lizzie Bourne’s performance as Helena is anything to go by, this saying is absolutely right. In her ecstatic unrequited frustration, Bourne not only sums up the pain of love, but also, its exaggerated and addictive qualities.

Despite staying faithful to the text, the production, still allows for reinterpretation, as it steps out of its usual environment. What is most striking is our use of the English language today. Even though a change in our choice of language is a somewhat natural progression of society, it is curious to note that all classes, in their verbal succinctness, are today more reflective of the play’s lower class labourers as opposed to their silver-spooned leaders. In this confident conciseness, at least, perhaps Shakespeare lives on more in our lives than we care to realise.

At the end of the day, the pace of the performance matters not. For every cluster of lines missed, the line that you catch will come out studded with perfection. Jewelled with sentences that you want to read and underline time and time again, my only advice would be to dig out a copy of the play before you go to see it. Like many theatre performances, you leave feeling like you have taken away more than you have given. With Shakespeare there is very little left to give – and a lot more to take.