A Midsummer Night's Dream – Windsor Great Park ***
You can pick up plenty about a show from the adverts in its programme. Strolling into the Windsor Great Park, I was handed a thick, glossy booklet with ads for private wealth management companies and luxury gin. Then again, Watch Your Head Productions has connections – Princess Beatrice tweeted support for her old schoolfriend behind it – and I suspect most of Windsor's elite will drop by.This is a genteel Dream, where no dark sexuality or father's curse seems to impose much threat- but if you're looking for a relaxed evening's entertainment, there's little more magical than wandering the Park with this crew of fairies, transformed by Shabnam Spiers' Arthur Rackham inspired costumes.
Besides the lush setting, the secret weapon in Sasha McMurray's production is Anneli Page's sardonic Titania. Doubling as Hippolyta, she starts off as Game of Thrones' Cersei Lannister in iambic pentameter, seeking the answer to her marital woes at the bottom of an elegant goblet; by the time she's coupling will Olly Lavery's enjoyably indulgent Bottom, she's the most enticing of liberated housewives. It's just a shame that Jack Bannell's lolling Oberon gives her little back.
McMurray's staging suffers from the fashionable disease of calling itself 'immersive' when it means 'promenade'. We follow Joss Wyre's Puck around the gardens. She's livelier when silently throwing impish pratfalls than when struggling to project and missing storytelling cues. All this promenading is hard on the knees, but if you have an energetic ten-year-old ready to see their first Midsummer Night's Dream, I suspect they'll love it.
Kate Maltby, The Times, 30th June 2015