IT is midsummer night and unearthly happenings are afoot. Bottom is rampaging around in the darkness, kept company by a pair of bumpkins; Puck weaves his mischievous magic around a fairy king and queen.
But wait, we are far removed from Shakespeare's Athenian forest and the palace of Theseus. Thanks to the quicksilver imagination of, writer Marie Jones, we find ourselves plunged into deepest Donegal among the bushes where courtiers, fairy folk and rude mechanicals have been replaced by Belfast foreman Eddie Bottom and his wife, Helen; a German land speculator; some high minded Irish mystics; an exiled teetotal German fairy and two bodhran playing bogmen.
It is not the first time that Ms Jones has dabbled in Shakespeare. Her reshaping of the role of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew for the Lyric a couple of years ago was a neat piece of theatrical daring and it looked, briefly, as though her even more audacious tilt at The Dream might have the sheer brass neck to pull through. But Pam Brighton's production for DubbelJoint (in a first time collaboration with the Opera "House) has had to be puffed and teased to extremities in an unsatisfying attempt to fill a space for which the piece is not at all suited.
The plot turns on a German speculator's plans to build a golf course in the hills of Donegal, not reckoning on the complications of grazing lambs and an ancient fairy thornbush. But, as one set of beshamrocked cliche's is debunked, it is replaced by a rather more unpleasant scenario, in which one side of the conflict is portrayed as ugly, nasty, uncultured and worthless, while the other is in possession of a rich history, ancient tradition and poetic vision, some of which, incidentally, it is willing to give up in the name of peace and progress - no prizes for guessing which is which.
Among the cast, Johnny Murphy and the inspired Conleth Hill prove themselves the saviours of a long, unsettling evening, stalking the stage with moody cynicism as O'Brien the fairy king and his diamond bright cohort, Puck.
