Simon Ward reviews A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Wilton’s Music Hall

If you are not familiar with it, and, in fact, even if you are, you should arrive early to enjoy the splendour that is Wilton’s Music Hall. Updated just enough to meet modern health and safety requirements, it is a glorious survival from the heyday of the late-nineteenth century music hall entertainment, and was designed by John Wilton to bring West End-style entertainment to the people of London’s East End. Its fascinating history is well worth exploring. One can feel the weight of centuries worth of history in the bars and the auditorium.

It is just the sort of venue that a wandering troupe of actors would have chosen for their version of one of Shakespeare’s best loved and most performed plays. And this seems to be exactly what Flabbergast Theatre have done, parking their large charabanc on stage whence characters emerge or lounge and where props, costumes and musical instruments lurk.

A vigorous and engergetic ensemble, Flabbergast bring the same genre-busting excitement which they applied to last year’s Macbeth to another play infused with magic and illusion, albeit to quite different purposes. Somehow a cast of seven managed to play all the parts, helped by inventive and witty use of masks and plenty of quick costume changes. The world of the fairies was invoked by bits of flotsam and jetsam which came alive through the power of puppetry. And the ensemble singing, with music by Nick Hart, evoked some of the most spine-tingling moments of the evening.

Beyond all the dream-like and magical elements, however, the success of any production will depend on whether it is funny. Here, the results were mixed. Some of the slapstick elements came across as too broad for my taste. It is notoriously difficult to get the balance right with the Mechanicals – here I felt that Bottom peaked a little too soon with the hamminess, although the final staging of Pyramus and Thisbe did deliver big laughs. Some of the verbal wit and jousting among the lovers was not as effective as it can be as key words were lost in the delivery. The company seems to be international so some of the cast members have pronounced accents – there would be no issue with this if the diction was clear and the meaning came across, but too often it didn’t quite.

There were lots of things to like here, however, including the physicality and infectious energy of the performers conjuring some truly magical moments, but I do suspect that there may have been some people struggling to follow the plot if they had never seen it before. In the end, though, the play proved its indestructibility once again and when Puck bade us to give him our hands, we were indeed his friends.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs until Saturday 20th April at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, London E1 8JB