The start of summer may yet be nearly six weeks away, but the weather in Bristol today had all the ingredients of a British summer - patchy sun, a cool breeze, and lashing rain. It seems a fitting kind of day on which to view on of Shakespeare's more irreverant plays, therefore, and the good folks at the Old Vic have provided us with just such an evening's entertainment.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is normally the kind of play studied in schools relatively early on, before any of the bard's more heavy-going pieces, in order (apparently) to give the kids the idea that Shakespeare can be fun, not all long indecipherable speeches and slushy romanticism. An image tends to stick of it in some people's heads, then, of it being a play somewhat less explorative of the passions of the senses, and lacking in much sohpistication. Since I first studied it (yes, as my first Shakespeare play at school), though, it's always been one of my favourites, so I was looking forward to tonight.

The bulk of the action takes place over one midsummer's night (as the title suggests), and concerns the fates of two sets of lovers. Hermia, who is told by her father that she must marry Demetrius, is in fact in love with Lysander, who returns the feeling. Demetrius is just as enamoured with Hermia, however, and to further complicate things has an admirer himself, in the form of Helena. The matter is taken to Theseus, the king of Athens, who decrees that Helena will either submit to her father's will and marry Demetrius, or face her punishment - life in a nunnery, or death. She is to have but four days - the time left before Theseus' own wedding to his queen Hippolyta - to make her choice. When Lysander and Helena elope that night, aiming to reach a relative's cottage where they can marry without fear of the statutes of the city-state, they are followed by Demetrius, who in turn is tracked by Helena. Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen of the forest, are not best pleased with each other on this of all nights, however, and when Oberon chooses to bring the "mortals" in as pawns to settle the score with his wife, and his assistant Puck gets confused with his directions, bringing in (as an amusing sideline to the main bulk of the story) a group of mechanicals preparing a play for Theseus' wedding celebrations, all hell duly breaks loose...

The curtain is already up as the audience enter the theatre, though the safety curtain forms a backdrop for the first section of the play, King Theseus of Athens' hearing of Hermia's case. Characters enter straight down the middle of the audience, and continue to do so at points throughout the play, helping to lend the rather grand setting of the Theatre Royal an atmosphere (only slightly) closer to that of the Globe itself. After these initial scenes, and following Lysander and Hermia's decision to run off to the woods, the backdrop is lifted to reveal a lavish set featuring the trees of the woods, hanging ropes, bushes and, ever present from this point on, the moon of a midsummer's night hanging low over the stage.  

Costumes don't appear to be of any specific era, matters in this point being somewhat muddied by the faded and falling-apart rags-of-dresses and suits worn by the rather eerily robotic fairies, though interestingly guns have been substituted for Lysander and Demetrius' swords. Sound effects are used only to enhance effect, never to give an effect in the first place, and the use of tinny magic-box style music makes the choreography of the fairies' movements look really something.

The casting is cleverly done, the dual-roling of Ronan Vibert (The Pianist) and Jaye Griffiths (Casualty) as Theseus - Oberon and Hippolyta - Titania respectively, bringing out more clearly the possible alter-egos of the two daytime monarchs, which when coupled with the bedraggled state of clothing worn by the two sets of lovers during the night-time bulk of the play, passes comment on a different state of affairs after the witching hour - in Shakespeare's day, of course, much emphasis was placed on staring at the moon making one mad.

The king and queen are, for me, the central pivot of the show throughout, whilst Tom Smith's Puck was, to my mind, played slightly too childishly - I always saw the sprite as absent minded without necessarily being big-babyish, although this does get less grating as we see more of him. The others are all fine, although Patrick Kennedy as Lysander seems a little wooden when he comes within a few feet of Lyndsey Marshal's Hermia - which does stand out somewhat, since the two are meant to be lovers. The mechanicals - Craig Edwards, Howard Coggins, Andrew Melville, Will Tacey, David Sibley and most notably Stewart Wright's quite superb Bottom (character name rather than physical admiration on my part) predictably get the audience vote for providing the lion's share of the laughs, especially towards the end of the play, when their own celebratory show for the king's nuptials is staged.

All in all, the Theatre Royal doesn't deserve the oddly half empty look it had for tonight's showing, and nor do the cast or directors. One or two character niggles, and an oddly undramatic delivery of (in my opinion) one of Shakespeare's most memorable entrance lines ("Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania", says Oberon to his queen near the start of the forest sequence) don't detract a great deal from what is, when all's said and done, an enjoyable evening out.

The story itself wouldn't exactly be rocket science to improve on (it doesn't take a visiting schoolchild to notice the odd time lapse from Theseus' "four days" deadline dwindling to one rather stretched out night), but then many of Shakespeare's comedies are the same, and few, somehow, are quite this bizarre. Go and view with an open mind, and possibly a notebook to jot down who's in love with who as the play progresses, and just allow yourself to be taken in. It's not hard at all to enjoy it.

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