Notes from the stage director, Colin Graham.

“The best of this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them” (Theseus) The four tangled lovers of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, very similar to those of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, may have first appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the reasons for their entanglements are just as current today, aided by drugs and alcohol, in our own permissive and licentious age where the rest of us in this “amazed world” wander, sometimes fruitlessly, sometimes not, and get lost in the woody maze of our emotions.

Mozart was engaged to one sister but married the other—a situation biographically paralleled in Così where the lovers may or may not end up where they started. In The Dream, Demetrius is engaged to one woman but chases the other and Lysander is mistakenly enchanted into chasing the wrong woman until Puck is finally able to restore order between the couples.

Apart from Puck, one of the main causes of these entanglements (as is Don Alfonso in Così) the only principal character in The Dream who does not get so entangled is the innocent and self-absorbed Bottom—so innocent that he is the only mortal able to see the fairies and, apparently, so innocent that he is not affected by Tytania’s blatant sexuality.

Not all fairies are pretties with gossamer wings: many are dangerous darklings who prowl in the undergrowth intent on tripping us up. A petty marital spat causes tempests and hurricanes when Oberon and Tytania fight; Puck and Oberon mess up other couples as a result of this spat, and the turbulence experienced by the three couples only reaches calm waters at dawn—just as Ferrando and Guglielmo return at dawn to set, as they think, matters finally to rights in Così.

All three happy couples receive an amusing object lesson, one way or another, in the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby where star-crossed lovers (so similar to Romeo and Juliet but here portrayed by two delightful grotesques ) meet a tragic end as a result of others meddling with their lives. Lysander is to warn us all of this when he tells Hermia right at the beginning of the story “ The course of true love never did run smooth.”

How right he is.

Puck and Theseus have both told us that we are nothing but intangible, ephemeral shadows, but let Bottom have the last word:

“I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was!"

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