A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe, review: Risky gender-bending works like a charm

An often very funny production, but Emma Rice needs to relax and let things breathe

Zubin Varla as Oberon and Meow Meow as Titania in Emma Rice's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Steve Tanner)

Emma Rice launches her new regime as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe with a burstingly irreverent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the Rude Mechanicals are played as a bunch of Globe stewards and cleaners. They are led by the formidable Rita Quince (Lucy Thackeray), with Ewan Wardrop as Bankside Health and Safety Officer, Nick Bottom, farcically failing to establish himself as an alpha male in this all-women outfit. At the start, they take us through the ropes of Globe etiquette. “We're all for 'Original Practices' at the Globe,” Rita declares and then undercuts herself by sternly warning us to “refrain from public urination or spreading syphilis”.

We're not in for an evening of scholarly best behaviour or academic investigation, that's for sure. But the dynamic between the actors on the open stage and the groundlings in the courtyard, which is key to the Globe's success, is in robustly fine fettle here. There's a strong Indian flavour (sitar music and bhangra dancing) to a show that does not, to put it mildly, defer to purists. Shakespeare's text is interwoven with many other voices: among them, George Formby, David Bowie and the John Donne of “To His Mistris Going To Bed” - “Licence my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below” rather sophisticated verse for Edmund Derrington's Lysander to be singing as he struggles to leave the up-for-it Hermia (Anjana Vasan) intacta in her tent.

Meow Meow as Titania and Nandi Bhebhe as First Fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Steve Tanner)

Some might think that Rice's most controversial stroke is to turn the spurned Helena into the male “Helenus” of Hoxton, a forlorn youth who trails with pining desire after Ncuti Gatwa's Demetrius. This latter, wanting to make an advantageous marriage to Hermia, is in denial about his real feelings. The gender-bending works like a charm, in fact, largely because Ankur Bahl portrays Helenus with such funny and touching delicacy. There's a lovely moment in the forest when the three men absently share lip gloss and the excluded Hermia's gay-best-friend relationship with Helenus unravels with wholly convincing bitterness.

Rice, former boss of Kneehigh, has directed only one previous piece by the Bard. If this often very funny production fails to impart a tingly sense of otherworldy spookiness, it's not because of the casting (the self-styled “kamikaze” cabaret artiste, Meow Meow, is an outrageous success as Titania, losing everything but her tutu in her demeaning pitch at Bottom). Nor is it down to Rice's much-criticised decision to install amplifiers and use coloured lights. It's because all the falling-over-backwards not to be boring feels over-strenuous and a touch defensive. There is even an in-joke, “Why this obsession with text?” in the “Pyramus and Thisbe” interlude, the comedy of which has been somewhat gazumped here by the mood of what has gone before. Rice needs to relax and let things breathe. She has the talent to do exceptional work at this address.

To Sept 11; 020 7401 9919

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