Theatre: A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Abbey Theatre, Dublin

3/5

A Tender Thing invited audiences to consider Romeo and Juliet as an elderly couple, and now A Midsummer Night’s Dream is doing something similar.

Our setting for Gavin Quinn’s directorial debut at the Abbey Theatre, a play of young lovers, meddling fairies and weddings, is a nursing home, beautifully designed by Aedin Cosgrove.

Those ‘young’ lovers are rather long in the tooth. The youngest is Gina Moxley, as Helena. She is joined by John Kavanagh, as Lysander, Barry McGovern, as Demetrius, and Aine Ni Muiri, as Hermia. Along with them are veterans of the former Abbey Acting Company. It’s a cast whose professional experience stretches back to the 1950s.

David Pearse gives one of his customary, show-stealing comic turns leading the Mechanicals, who include Andrew Bennett as a not-too-buffoonish Bottom. Completing the line-up are Declan Conlon and Fiona Bell, stately and reserved in their respective double roles as Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta.

Quinn does not perform the same cut-and-paste surgery upon the text that Ben Power did to make A Tender Thing.

But there are telling changes needed to make his conceit fly. Egeus complains not of his daughter’s disobedience, but of his mother’s. When he speaks of her punishment for disobedience, “death, according to the law”, there is a chilling plausibility here, against the western world’s incipient senescence, and the changing nature of intergenerational relationships.

While Quinn’s conceit is a raison d’être for the production, it also allows him to leave the play well enough alone. The only other significant change is the addition of four well-chosen sonnets.

The themes of loss and of time passing, in Quinn’s quartet, are a poignant counterbalance to the anarchic action. Images of “the violet past its prime” and “trees...barren of leaves” forbid us from getting too comfortably wrapped up in the words and action.

Yet, this production repeatedly strikes a life-affirming note: the performers make a congo line, wear Halloween costumes, strut the stage in skin-tight jeans, dance to a hardcore techno tune. The Mechanicals’ daft sketch is not bathetic, but becomes celebratory. True, “nothing ’gainst time’s scythe can make defence”, but that’s no reason not to be defiant.

Until March 28