A midsummer night's dream

Tuesday

Will Tosh

From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft

Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright’s birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of many of our brains, ready to be summoned when trivia duty calls. But 1576? Not so much. Shakespeare was 12, ink-stained and anonymous at grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Which only goes to show that untrammelled bardolatry isn’t good for theatre history, because even while tweenager William was memorising his Latin vocab a turning point in

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Spot-on in almost every way: Scottish Opera’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reviewed

Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs and the aurora borealis flickers and arcs across the darkened sky. Meanwhile Britten’s score swoons and sighs, its drowsy clouds of string tone wafting above gently snoring basses to create an atmosphere whose every glimmer evokes perfumed warmth. It should be a contradiction, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. Dominic Hill’s direction, Tom Piper’s designs and Lizzie Powell’s lighting (it’s hard to separate their contributions) create a visual world of opposites, illusions and inverted expectations; a setting for magic and misrule, which last time I checked is pretty