A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Southwark Playhouse, SE1

reviewed for The Times, 9th June 2016

Freddie Fox as Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream at Southwark Playhouse,
Image credit: Harry Grindrod

Another week, another A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The big institutions — the BBC, the RSC, the Globe — have all had their go this anniversary year and now it’s the turn of the small, spare Southwark Playhouse. The biggest draw is Freddie Fox (son of Edward, grandson of Robin), possessor of prodigious talent as well as dynastic destiny. Cult theatre-watchers may be more excited by the involvement of the director Simon Evans, fresh from staging The Dazzle and Bug in the fraught, constricted new space at Found111 in central London.

Evans sees Dream as both “a play about weather” and “a play about what is real, and what is not”. So his cast tell us, in an occasionally grating commentary. This is a play within a play — within a play. As the audience settle, a group of young actors gather to discuss how to stage a seven-man Dream, and how to use the advantage of a celeb among them. Fox sends himself up deliciously, grandly requiring that a lesser-known namesake in the cast (Freddie Hutchins) assume a middle name for rehearsals.

Soon Freddie Fox, swaggering thesp, becomes Nick Bottom, swaggering thesp, though he still sounds like he’s straight from Bedales to Shoreditch. Then, however, a real transformation: as convincing a physical exploration of the transition of man to donkey as you’ll see in a lifetime of Dreams. There’s a deep bodily trauma here, a tortured and contorted set of muscles, sinews, skull. Yet Fox channels just enough of Bottom’s pomposity and narcissism to keep us laughing. Extraordinary.

Elsewhere, Suzie Preece’s Hermia is a standout — her exchanges with Fox’s Demetrius, his other major role, bristle. Maddy Hill (Nancy Carter in EastEnders) is a frail, victimised Titania, and Hutchins simpers rather as Lysander. He’s better as a seething, resentful Flute. “I hate you,” he finally snaps at Fox’s Bottom. “Use it!” intones the method ham.

Evans is sensitive to the play’s reading as an apocalyptic nature myth, but his greater project is to reawaken our theatrical faith. A welcome aim, but all a bit worthy in delivery: do we really need Melanie Fullbrook’s decidedly non-magical Puck lecturing us on the anti-imaginative limitations of cinema? This filleted Dream feels fresh, but a little more subtlety could have made it soar.