2013 Globe Production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Cast and Crew:CREATIVESDirected by:Dominic DromgooleDesigned by:Jonathan FensomComposed by:Claire van Kampen

Lovers:Helena – Sarah MacRaeDemetruis – Joshua SilverHermia – Olivia RossLysander – Luke Thompson

The Mechanicals:Bottom – Pearce QuigleyPeter Qunice – Fergal McElherronSnout – Tom LawrenceStarveling – Huss Garbiya Flute – Christopher LoganSnug – Edward PeelThe Fairies:Oberon – John LightTitania – Michelle TerryPuck – Matthew TennysonFairy – Molly LoganFairy – Tala Gouveia

The Nobles: Theseus – John Light Hippolyta– Michelle Terry Egeus – Edward Peel

The Globe uses Thrust style staging – this is in order to create a greater intimacy between actors and audience.

Lysander and Hermia

The fours lovers in the midst of their quarrel

The Mechanicals: (Bottom is on the far left)

The play of Pyramus and Thisbe

Puck and Oberon Oberon and Titania

Bottom and Titania

Titania and the fairies – their costumes consisted of animal tails/furs, woodland colours and animal masks. This caused the fairies to have a wild, dark look about them.

Reviews:Charles Spencer, The Telegraph:“Dominic Dromgoole’s lively affectionate and consistently inventive staging beautifully captures both the humour and the disconcerting strangeness of the play.”“There is emotional depth as well as humour in this production. John Light’s commanding and highly physical Oberon, who is constantly shinning up the pillars of the Globe’s stage on ropes, suggests real shame when he sees his beloved doting on an ass.”Alexandra Coghlan, The Arts Desk:“The big draws here is Michelle Terry’s Titania/Hippolyta. In Dromgoole’s reading we are reminded that this is more than a passive royal consort, that Hippolyta is in fact Queen of the Amazons.”“Terry makes for an imperious, haughty queen, but is rather more appealing as the girlish-wild Titania, scrapping and flirting with her Oberon. Light by contrast feels more at home as the rigid Theseus, never quite releasing into the savage hedonism of a fairy king who clasps Puck in a lingering embrace and howls animal-like in his rage.”“There’s a quiet insistence on anarchy through the production, and while Bottom’s comedic dangers are harmless enough Dromgoole’s fairy world is altogether more ferocious. Undercurrents of (homo)sexual desire flood into the foreground, while the spirits themselves become a hooting, shrieking pack of unearthly hooligans.”“Few play teenage boys as well as Tennyson (as he proved so thoroughly in the Donmar’s Making Noise Quietly), and here he brings all the sulky, gangling awkwardness of a 14-year-old Etonian to the fairy – more affectedly brattish, perhaps, than is necessary, but ultimately rather the more human for it.”