Theatre reviews: A Midsummer Night's Dream | Faustus

Glasgow Botanic Gardens

****

Doctor Faustus

Glasgow Botanic Gardens

***

Can it be that in the age of internet, with all its invisible influences and influencers putting a girdle around the earth in far less than 40 minutes, it somehow becomes easier to believe in Shakespeare’s fabulous fairy creatures – or at least in their power to change human hearts and minds in an instant?

Perhaps; at any rate, what’s clear is that the 2025 Bard In The Botanics season launches with a truly delightful and completely persuasive version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that puts Shakespeare’s powerful fairy creatures centre stage. In Bard director Gordon Barr’s production, an 11-strong company of young actors take to the stage in a version which – unusually for this company – makes no change to the original gender balance of Shakespeare’s comedy about four bewildered lovers lost in the forest, and vulnerable to fairy magic.

There is, though, a crucial switch between fairy king and queen – James Boal’s gorgeous green-clad Oberon, and Claire Macallister’s proud Titania – as to who drives the plot, and wins the war between them.

And with veteran Bard favourite Allan Steele joining the cast as Bottom, star of the troop of tradesman actors rehearsing a play for the duke’s wedding, the stage is set – not least thanks to Carys Hobbs’s lush green design – for a glorious romp through Shakespeare’s tale. Lola Aluko and Star Penders make a fine comic pairing as the female lovers Hermia and Helena, while Bailey Newsome turns in an outstanding comic performance as Peter Quince, the exasperated director of the tradesman’s plays, and Steele and Boal extract maximum hilarity from the potion-induced romance between Oberon and Bottom, magically transformed into an ass.

None of this would work half so well, though, without the remarkable presence of Benjamin Keachie’s Glasgow Puck, a gleefully irreverent spirit who combines power and good looks with a terrific eloquence in both Shakespearean verse and Glasgow patter.

As Titania’s servant, Puck is the spirit who makes and mars the whole drama, with his mischievous mistakes, and his final skill in rectifying them all; and he leads this joyful Dream to a witty and rousing conclusion, roundly celebrated by the subway-strike crowd at the bus stop afterwards. “It was Shakespeare,” said one to a bystander. “But it was just so funny. We loved it!”

In the elegant space of the Kibble Palace, meanwhile, Barr’s associate director Jennifer Dick offers a thoughtful but inconclusive 80-minute version of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a play written just a couple of years before A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the 1590’s; but arguably more modern, in its fraught relationship with the supernatural powers it invokes.

In Dick’s version, Doctor Faustus is a medic dressed in modern-day scrubs; but as in the original play, he yearns for power and excitement beyond what his worthwhile profession can offer.

The main theatrical feature of Dick’s version is the intense conflict she imagines between a melancholy and charismatic Sam Stopford as the demon Mephistopheles, who encourages Faust to sell his soul to the devil in return for glamorous magical powers, and a fragile, yet fiercely memorable Rebecca Robin as Faust’s good angel, constantly urging repentance and a return to God.

In best horror-movie style, these two forces challenge and torture one another, sometimes possessed by strange voices and movements; while between them, Adam Donaldson struggles slightly to pull the focus back to the magnificent, agonised poetry of Faust’s descent into hell.

Marlowe’s play, though, involves a powerful critique of the male fascination for flashy technology, or “magic”, that offers transient and superficial forms of power; and although the imagined struggle for Faust’s soul portrayed here sometimes sits at a slight tangent to that theme, the show still offers a haunting sense of a human soul destroyed by wrong choices, in ways that carry huge resonances across our damaged 21st century world.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Doctor Faustus both at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, until 12 July