A bittersweet Dream brings snow to summer and Bottom to the top

Sunday 28 October 2012

A Midsummer Night's Dream

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Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Until November 17

American Idiot

Seen at Playhouse, Edinburgh, run ended

Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, Monday-Saturday

Reviewed by Alan Morrison

This year's Shakespeare juggernaut rolleth ever onwards. Rather contrarily, director Matthew Lenton has decided to locate his version of A Midsummer Night's Dream amid the drifting white snowflakes of winter. Textual paradoxes be damned: this, within Kai Fischer's pallid set design, works all the better to show off the vibrant colours in which Becky Minto has costumed the Athenian lovers.

Colour defines the three distinct worlds of this play. Thus we have the rather spoilt, romantically befuddled quartet of young Athenians expressing their unruly passions in snowsuits so tonally bright they would blind the Teletubbies; the schism within Oberon and Titania's fairy realm rendered in stark black and white; and the mechanicals knocking about in functional browns.It's those mechanicals – in their shambolic attempt to stage an entertainment for Duke Theseus's nuptials – that provide the play with its enduring comic genius (although the wrestling and bickering of the lovers, as their flower-drugged confusion takes hold, plus the wonderfully physical performance of Cath Whitefield as a goblinish Puck, are also laugh-out-loud funny in this production). Lenton's shading of the story nudges Bottom, the humble weaver transformed into an ass and beloved for a while by fairy queen Titania, to the play's emotional centre. To this end the director is aided immensely not only by Jordan Young's nicely pitched clowning, but also by the prologue and epilogue that has been attached – very much in the visual style of Vanishing Point, the theatre company of which Lenton is Artistic Director – to Shakespeare's vision.Bottom sits beside his bedridden wife, a small TV in front of him, oxygen cylinders attached to her. At the start, it seems like an intrusive and anachronistic device ("Athens Hath Talent" on the telly screen, indeed). But at the end, it adds a note of poignancy to the boisterous humour of Bottom's character, sending us home with a richer but more bittersweet taste in our mouths.Shakespeare's appeal is timeless and universal: Green Day's is much more focussed. Could the American band itself fill the Playhouse for six consecutive nights and two matinees, then do the same a week later at the Clyde Auditorium? On a foggy Tuesday in Edinburgh, in a theatre barely a quarter full, it was clear the target audience was stretched thin for their rock opera, American Idiot.That's a shame, because American Idiot is a full-on Broadway production writ large across a Scottish stage, something quite distinct from even the most impressive set-mechanics of the touring West End musicals that touch down here. Aside from the songs themselves, from Green Day's 2004 concept album, it's the set design that's the star of the show, as a backdrop of multiple television screens spew out war, death, conquest and all the other horsemen of the apocalypse who ride through the 21st century's mass media flood.What American Idiot gains in spectacle, it loses in emotional engagement. As bored teenager Johnny leaves home to find sex and drugs in the big city, only to return when, basically, he's dumped by his new girlfriend for shooting up, the character's emotional journey goes all the way from self-centred to self-pitying. To more cynical eyes on this side of the Atlantic, there's a whiff, too, of something like the Kids From Fame doing what Americans call punk – although the combined energy of this young ensemble succeeds in shaking off the designer disaffection that threatens to weaken what is unarguably a dazzling piece of stagecraft.

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A bittersweet Dream brings snow to summer and Bottom to the top

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