A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lyric Hammersmith, London

©Keith Pattison

Ferdy Roberts as Puck

You know how it is – you wait years for a food fight in a classic drama, then two come along at once. While the cast in The Changeling at the Young Vic smear one another with jelly, the actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream let rip in a full-throttle bun fight, hurling sausage rolls and flinging bags of flour around with spectacular abandon. It’s wild, messy and fun – which just about encapsulates this inventively irreverent version of the play.

This Dream has been dreamed up by director Sean Holmes and the company Filter, who previously collaborated on Twelfth Night, Three Sisters and Caucasian Chalk Circle. Their approach is not to stage a straightforward production of a play but to respond to it: pare it down, open it up, peer inside – rather like a child entranced by the workings of a watch. Here they seize on the madness of infatuation, the obsessive nature of the characters, which leads each of them into the tangle in the woods, and the importance of the play within the play. The drama rolls forward on a functional set and Peter Quince (Ed Gaughan) doesn’t just coax his am-dram company through their paces, he also introduces the whole show, gets his band to provide sound effects and chats to the cast about meta-fiction.

The show certainly catches the buzzy disorientation in the play and the descent into chaos once lust takes hold. As the characters are anointed with the juice from Oberon’s magic flower, they are smeared with blue ink. By the end of the night, most of the cast are bright blue, dishevelled, half-dressed and covered in food from the fight that ensues between the lovers. It’s often very funny and there are some brilliant ideas. For instance, Puck (Ferdy Roberts), a workmanlike technician who bursts through walls with his big boots (a delightful change from the usual ethereal sprite), manages the duel between Demetrius (Simon Manyonda) and Lysander (John Lightbody) as a video game, manoeuvring them with his controller.

This ingenious touch is typical of a madly imaginative production. But, as with any such radical approach, you lose something, and here it is, significantly, the context, shape and structure of the play. The contrast between Athens and the woods disappears, so the characters lose their moorings and with that, the resonance of their experience. It’s infectiously good-natured and fizzes with invention, but it misses that deeper impact.

www.lyric.co.uk