A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

They file onto an almost bare stage as though they'd just rolled into a rehearsal space abandoned by Peter Brook 40 years ago. These are the "Rude Mechanicals", the well-meaning stumblebums who perform the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and director Jason Byrne lets them set out the stall for Loose Canon's new production.

It’s not just the order of scenes that have been rearranged in this arm’s-length treatment of Shakespeare’s comedy of romantic entanglement, fairy intervention and hapless amateur dramatics. The lovers and fairies have also been demoted (all roles are divvied between five performers), prioritising the rude mechanics of the stage, downplaying the dream.

Instead of the sly slip of illusion and desire, then, we get a halting, sardonic and self-aware presentation. The subtle commentary of Shakespeare's metatheatrical fillips is writ larger than the text itself. And, though the production fidgets through borrowed film clips and arch reference, it finds very little it can add. "The course of true love never did run smooth," an off-stage chorus bleats along when Lysander hits the line, but like the rest of the production, the joke feels self-defeating. We've been here before, it shrugs. What more is there to say? An awful lot, actually. Comparisons are invidious, but Pan Pan's recent riff on Hamlet, The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane, found room for layers of interpretation, reference and self-reflexivity without sacrificing the spirit of the play.

Here, most of the text is dutifully intact, and the production seems as happy about that as if were shackled to a corpse. Phil Kingston’s earnestness, in a Metallica T-shirt and a pair of pink fairy wings, is enjoyable, but a part of me died each time Puck’s rhyming couplets were delivered like a begrudging mnemonic, or when the usually riveting Barry O’Connor staggered and stressed his lines, as though the king of the fairies was not Oberon, but Christopher Walken.

Louise Lewis is more fun because she has more fun as Helena, horrified to find her unrequited love forcibly requited, while the play also asserts itself through Ger Kelly, a muted Bottom who is transformed into a donkey without getting to make an ass of himself. The result feels like the wrong material for the method, in which a mumbled, denuded retelling tells us little about the play and less about ourselves.