A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Michael Grandage Company (review)

When the 2013 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for “Comedy” was bestowed on David Walliams for his performance as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I wondered what I had missed. Was it some peculiarly British sense of humor that I genetically lack? Walliams certainly dominated Michael Grandage’s West End production, just as the gigantic full moon projected onto the back wall dominated all the night scenes in the forest. But should a Bottom dominate a Dream? Sadly, the price that Grandage’s productions pay for his commitment to star-centered Shakespeare is, far too often, an underwhelming ensemble. They are overshadowed by, and sacrificed to, the largeness of the celebrity—here reflected in the largeness of the upstage moon. Designer Christopher Oram’s moon never moved or changed; was I the only sky-watcher in the audience, puzzled about a stationary moon that didn’t create shadows? I’m not usually literalistic about such things, but a lack of shadow, variety, and movement characterized this production in general and its star performer in particular.

The audience’s energy wasnoticeably raised when Walliams arrived on stage, presumably because they knew the actor through his excellent comedic television work in the BBC sketch show “Little Britain” and its predecessor “Rock Profile” and were therefore counting on him to wake up the play. He did. The opening court scene had been a cold parody of 1950s black-and-white-TV; the atmosphere was one of suppressed boredom, and the boredom was contagious. The best thing I can say about the four lovers was that they were pretty and quick, as though everyone wanted to race through their scenes as rapidly as possible, embarrassed by the play’s lyricism; they were ill-equipped to handle the verse. By contrast, Walliams played Bottom as the campiest old queen you’ve ever seen, dragging out his physical turns and foppish-hand-flops, as if to ask an invisible mirror “Who’s the fairest of them all?” That was occasionally funny, but the fun had nothing to do with the reality of homosexuals in the 1950s (or the present). This Dreamwas Walliams’s first professional performance in a Shakespeare play, and it showed. His over-the-top Bottom did not depend on any ability to milk nuances from the text. It was rather like a layer of frosting so thick that it drowned any taste of the cake beneath.

In the world of this production, Bottom got away with grandstanding because his partner (“ ob-viously”) was the director, Peter Quince. That directorial call made some psychological sense of Bottom’s casting, but it also ensured that Quince did not challenge his partner’s dominance. The scripted conflict between Quince and Bottom, director and leading actor, normally gives structure to the play’s scenes of casting, rehearsal, and court performance; that structure generates opportunities aplenty for actors to discover comic details that arise naturally but unpredictably from a clash of intentions and perspectives. But here, there were only the old stereotypes of the flouncing narcissistic queer (Bottom) and the uptight mincing queer (Quince). Without Quince to defend the other mechanicals, Bottom always succeeded in upstaging everyone else, jamming the magic. The very term “mechanicals” suggests that their individual eccentricities are parts of one complex contraption, and Shakespeare in their scenes created one of the most consistently successful laughter machines in English drama. But this production turned that magnificent ensemble into a one...