A Midsummer Night's Dream (PPH)

I saw this community production from the Printers’ Playhouse creative team on 25th September 2026 at the Eastbourne Bandstand. I don’t think I have ever felt so close to the spirit of the original play.

This adaptation was set in Glastonbury, sometime in the 1970s. Fortunately, the attitudes were not from the decade that normalised ‘queer-bashing’, allowing a neat role reversal which saw Oberon fall in love with donkey-headed Bottom. But the unabashed fashion experimentation of the '70s allowed the Athenians to wear the patterned clothing of the post-hippy generation (Demetrius, in patterned tie and matching shirt, looked as if his top half had been inspired by wallpaper) and the fairies to be punks. Congratulations to the costume designer, who also excelled with the Wall and the Moon.

The principal technical challenge of open-air theatre is to make the actors audible and radio microphones were used. Unfortunately, for me, this only partially solved the difficulties and I found it difficult to hear many of the lines spoken by some of the actors.

But the physical comedy was spot-on. Highlights included Demetrius and Lysander staging a slow-motion wrestling match as a backdrop to Hermia and Helena abusing one another, the Wall in the play-within-a-play, and donkey-headed Bottom having his ears tickled by a manifestly reluctant Peasblossom.

Several of the players excelled. Bottom was suitably bombastic as the ass of a tinker who is desperate to be in a play. Titania was delightfully grotesque as a flirtatious wannabe-pole-dancing punk fairy queen. Puck was cheeky and mischievous. But, for me, the star was Helena, who milked every drop of her jealousy and resentment of Hermia.

It was a vastly entertaining evening, performed before an appreciative audience, and I hope the pioneering initiative of staging a Shakespeare play at the Bandstand (Eastbourne’s Globe) will begin a tradition.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Bart van Es in ‘Shakespeare in Company’ argues that the ‘Dream’ was written in the eighteen months after Shakespeare became attached to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as company playwright, for the first time showing “a genuinely technical interest in the process of dramatic performance. ... In what is explicitly termed a ‘rehearsal’, Peter Quince’s performers make all the errors of first-time performers. They read their cue lines as part of the script and fail to pick up on the cues in the speeches of their fellows. They misread their lines, worry themselves over props and staging and continually demand alteration to the text.” (Ch 4) For perhaps the first time, he is writing for actors he knows. “Very likely the role of Starveling was taken by John Sincler, a hired man of the Chamberlain’s company, who was famously emaciated.” (Ch 4) The physical characteristics of Hermia (brown-haired and short) and Helena (blonde and tall) are written into the insults they will throw at one another. This makes ‘Dream’ a favourite for actors everywhere.