A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe, London

Delightful pyjama game works like a dream

Andy Warhol once shot an utterly static five-hour movie of a man sleeping. The result is enough to make you drop off, but it does bring home how this state is somewhat under-represented in drama.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, though, is as drenched in sleep as the eyes of the lovers are in the magic juice that sedates them and then makes them infatuated with the first being they encounter on reviving. Through their misadventures, the division between the world of sleep and of waking gets blurred.

Michael Alfreds' delightful production stretches this idea over the whole event. At the start, clad in nightshirts and pyjamas, the cast troop on dragging cushions and mattresses behind them and get ready for bed. One actor charms and outrages the groundlings by spitting his toothpaste water into their courtyard.

So, when the characters start from their slumber and head into the first scene, it is as though the play is to be understood as a collective dream. At first I worried that this metaphor might swamp the proceedings. You could, after all, be forgiven for thinking that a production in which the whole cast remain in night-wear throughout and in which the lovers and "mechanicals" double as the fairies would flatten the play's wide range of tones. Part of the fun, though, of Alfreds' account is the good-natured way it turns a potential handicap into a strength.

To indicate a switch from a human to a non-human being, a smattering of fairy lights twinkle in the cast's pyjamas. It's a winningly cheeky touch, like conveying the naivete of the mechanicals by having them use intimate bathroom props in their amateur interlude, serenely unconscious that lion's manes made from pedestal mats and thorn trees from bog brushes might be construed as "lavatory humour". But then, this is a staging that can leap from the earthily prosaic to the poetic in a flash, as in the magical moment when a sheaf of toilet paper suddenly metamorphoses into the fatal flower.

John Ramm, as an adorably keen Bottom, and Simon Trinder whose Puck is a charismatic cherub, crowing and cartwheeling with glee, head the fine company in a Dream which, though it could be subtitled "The Pyjama Game", never falls asleep on the job.