Shorter, please

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Novello

Thriller — Live
Lyric

Too long. Too long. Way, way too long. Is it just me or is A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice the length it should be? No, it’s not just me. It’s everyone. It has to be. And I blame the movies. Billy Wilder reckoned a comedy should last no more than an hour and a half. ‘Every minute over 90,’ he said, ‘counts against you.’ Obviously, films aren’t plays but we’ve been schooled unwittingly in the celluloid aesthetic and we can’t park it in the cloakroom, we bring it to the auditorium.

It seems odd that directors will happily lumber Shakespeare with all kinds of bad-choice complexities (pin-stripe suits, girls playing boys, video projections, guns for swords) in an effort to accommodate the Elizabethan world to modern tastes and yet they’re reluctant to acknowledge our conviction that comedies should be brisk, punchy affairs which release you from their enchantment within two hours.

So I always approach the Dream with dread and in this case my fears, most of them anyway, proved groundless. Greg Doran’s production has a pleasing lack of time-warp novelty. He suits the Athenian noblemen in jackets and trousers but gets away with it, and he locates the wood-fairies, as the script suggests, in a wood rather than in Butlins, or Guantanamo Bay, or a Glasgow crack-den, or a centre for moral correction in Soviet Russia, or an oil-tanker, or an eco-pod, or a donkey sanctuary, or Mars. Nope, it’s a wood. Good.

Kathryn Drysdale (the geeky bird from Two Pints of Lager) plays Hermia with butter-fingered charm and breezy comic assurance. Tom Davey, recently promoted from Guildenstern to Laertes during David Tenant’s enforced sabbatical from Hamlet, shows quite a gift for light comedy here as Lysander despite being hampered by his chiselled good looks.