Theatre

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Neil Cooper

Three stars

Opening a New Year production of Shakespeare's sunniest rom-com during a weekend of stormy weather more appropriate to The Tempest is a gloriously contrary gesture. There was much warmth on offer, however, in Ali de Souza's 1920s take on the play performed in the RCS' Chandler Studio space by young acting students.

The romantic merry-go-round builds up an impressive head of dry ice later on, but it's a rag-time soundtrack that ushers in the assorted cross-class shenanigans that follows. Even the Mechanicals - here the Royal Artisans of Athens Alliance Amateur Drama, or RAAAADA, if you please - enter with a soft-shoe chorus line.

Lysander and Demetrius are a pair of horny lads in stripey blazers, and the objects of their assorted affections, Hermia and Helena, a couple of society flappers who've just discovered boys. Only once things move underground, however, and Puck applies his chemical charms in all the wrong places, does the party really start to swing. Here Laurie Scott's flat-capped ham of a Bottom falls in with Catherine Barr's Poison Ivy-like Titania and her coterie of tie-dye clad love-children who resemble revellers at a jazz-age rave.

If Titania is the play's liberated female heart, it rubs off on her more earth-bound sisters too. Alex Kampfner makes for a sprite-like Hermia fit to burst as she spars with the specky string-bean and force of comedic nature that is Sarah Miele's Helena. If the pair's interplay with their suitors captures the full vainglorious thrust of the dating game's many pitfalls, their own exchanges are a hell-hath-no-fury whirlwind before all involved must face the music and dance.