A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Windsor Great Park

reviewed for The Times, 30 June 2015

You can pick up plenty about a show from the adverts in its programme. Strolling into the ornate landscape of Windsor Great Park, I was handed a booklet thicker and glossier than most new companies can afford, replete with ads for private wealth management companies and luxury gin (copiously on sale throughout the performance). Then again, Watch Your Head Productions has connections — Princess Beatrice tweeted support for her old schoolfriend behind it — and I suspect most of Windsor’s elite will drop by.

Yet while I’ll own up to being an urban snob about this genteel Dream — where no dark sexuality or father’s curse seems to impose much threat — if you’re looking for a relaxed evening’s entertainment, there’s little more magical than wandering the Great Park with this crew of fairies, transformed by Shabnam Spiers’ Arthur Rackham-inspired costumes.

Besides the lush setting, the secret weapon in Sasha McMurray’s production is Anneli Page’s sardonic Titania. Doubling as Hippolyta, she starts off as Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister in iambic pentameter, seeking the answer to her marital woes at the bottom of an elegant goblet; by the time she’s coupling with Olly Lavery’s enjoyably indulgent Bottom, she’s the most enticing of liberated housewives. It’s just a shame that Jack Bannell’s lolling Oberon gives her little back.

McMurray’s production suffers from the fashionable disease of calling itself “immersive” when it means “promenade”. We follow Joss Wyre’s Puck around the gardens. She’s the chirpy love child of Mr Tumnus and the Artful Dodger, although livelier when silently throwing impish pratfalls than when struggling to project and missing storytelling cues in her scenes with Oberon.

All this promenading is hard on the knees — it’s not for the mobility-impaired — but if you have an energetic ten-year-old ready to see their first Midsummer Night’s Dream, I suspect they’ll love it.