Bottom: what it’s like playing Shakespeare’s most famous ass

Local amateurs are stepping in to play the role of Bottom alongside the professionals in the Royal Shakespeare Company's A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A scene from the RSC’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, starring Ayesha Dharker (Topher McGrillis)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has always been popular with amateur dramatics groups – not least because it features Shakespeare’s own affectionate send-up, when the Rude Mechanicals put on a comically disastrous play. Still, this magical tale is also always a bankable hit for professional companies: there are at least four major productions this year. And one of these is cleverly bringing together the worlds of amateur and professional drama.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is touring A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in each destination, a local amateur group step in to play the Rude Mechanicals. Subtitled “a play for the nation”, this Dream is an ambitious but egalitarian project, an inclusive way to celebrate 400 years since Shakespeare’s death. It is also a “dream come true” for the many stagestruck amateurs, who can now count themselves RSC cast members.

Fourteen groups have been performing with them in theatres in their home towns, and are shortly to assemble in Stratford-upon-Avon for a final run. While the project is a thrilling opportunity for am-dram enthusiasts, it presents its own challenge for the professionals. Ayesha Dharker, who plays the fairy queen Titania, must romance no fewer than 14 different Bottoms.

And while the keen local thesps have being thoroughly schooled in the RSC style, they never get a full rehearsal of the show with the professionals before the curtain goes up. Which sounds frankly terrifying. So how has it been – for amateurs thrust into the limelight, and for professionals reacting to a new cast, week after week?

“It’s just such a ridiculous thing: someone who performs in a village hall, about to step on the RSC stage in Stratford,” says Martin Turner, who played Bottom in Glasgow and who can’t quite believe his luck. The 58-year-old, an estate agent in Stirling when not reclining in a fairy bower, has loved the whole experience – even if some of the working methods were a stretch.

“The RSC put a lot of work into making sure that we were fit for purpose. They set up this video conferencing thing with their rehearsals; it was innovative, but it was a long night sitting watching people 400 miles away on a laptop! But when the bandwagon arrived in town it was a pretty seamless fit.”

As for being wooed by the glamorous Dharker – well, no complaints there. “She’s such an alluring personality, and such a brilliant actor – she only really had to look at you and you got the sense of… the moment”!” he chuckles.

With the play directed by the RSC’s Erica Whyman, the Rude Mechanicals have been cast age and gender blind. At the Barbican in London, I see a jolly, matronly Peta (instead of Peter) Quince played by Maria Waters, while Starveling is played by Tom Tillery – who just turned 80. There are also two “lady Bottoms”, in Nottingham and Canterbury.

One of them, Becky Morris of the Lovelace Players in Nottingham, is starry-eyed at performing with the RSC. “It’s the biggest theatre company in the world arguably, and it’s the biggest gift I’ve ever had.”

The 42-year-old from Sutton-in-Ashfield was insistent, however, that she should play Bottom as a woman, rather than pretending to be a man; as a sixth-form learning mentor, and knows the importance of providing aspirational roles. “Why can’t these parts be played by a woman? It’s really important to say there are things we can change about heritage and culture, to push the boundaries.”

Still, Dharker approached the romantic scenes with sensitivity, promising it wouldn’t be “too girl-on-girl, too slimey”. Which is almost a shame, because A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often deliciously filthy. But this is a family production, playing to many school groups.

“There have been raunchier versions, but there might have been an embarrassment factor to it too, so they’ve made the right choice,” says John Chapman, a Bottom for the Barbican in London; at 62, he’s a member of the Tower Theatre Company, an amateur group dating back to 1932, as well as working as an education consultant.

That said, he reports that Dharker is very responsive to whatever the Bottoms throw at her – once, when lounging in her fairy bower (actually, a grand piano), “I suddenly saw her toes, and I thought ‘ooh, I could do this little piggy went to market’… and Ayesha just goes with it.”

For Dharker, this unusual way of working is proving exhilarating. Playing opposite a new actor each week is like “plugging your finger into a socket.” And she’s been impressed by the how polished and capable they all are: “one of the big fears is that you let them down, or make it worse, or you creep them out by touching them inappropriately. Then the minute you work with them all that flies out the window: you don’t want to mollycoddle them".

Everyone involved hopes that the production will help soften the snooty divides between amateur and professional acting. “There is a snobbish aspect to it, and there have been reports of theatre-goers who’ve sniffed at the show,” says Turner.

“But the reviews tell you that people watching it are not aware of a differential.” It’s true: performances were seamless in the show I saw. The Daily Express even wrote of the London run that “the Tower Theatre members were not only the equal of their professional colleagues but, in many cases, surpassed them".

So far, all the shows have gone off without major hitches – although Morris reports struggling to get into the piano when her knee went mid-performance, and Turner nearly made one of the professional’s corpse with laughter onstage. He adds his own Scottish twist by playing Bottom in a wraparound kilt, and a wardrobe malfunction that might have threatened the status of ‘family show’ occurred in a dress rehearsal… Untraditional it may be, but underwear is now worn.

But if the Bottoms give off the impression of sailing through their RSC debuts, Dharker is afforded a more intimate glimpse of their nerves: “There was one who had such a brave face, and then I’d get in the bower with him and I could literally feel his heart beating into my back. Or they look fine, but you hold their hand and it’s shaking. We’ve had a couple of very quivery Bottoms!”

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is on tour until 4 June, and at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 15 June to 16 July