A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Regent’s Park Theatre

Last Updated on June 30, 2026

Rock and Roll Shakespeare Reaches Music Festival Heights

4.5 out of 5.0 stars

“Sound, music! Come, my queen, take hands with me,
And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been performed at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre more than 50 times since its first production there in 1933. The sylvian setting, surrounded by trees, with birds singing and the sun setting, makes for a perfect backdrop.

One of Shakespeare’s most popular works, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a tale with universal appeal. A love story generously seasoned with humour at its most straightforward. But it’s also a setting in which imagination creates reality – the forest a liminal space where ordinary rules no longer apply. And there’s an underlying theme that order emerges from chaos – with the divided lovers and the quarrelling fairy royalty brought together by the end. Is Shakespeare suggesting that we need those periods of confusion and disorder for growth and reconciliation?

For any director, taking an already massively successful work and creating a distinctive new vision must be something of a challenge. But that’s just what Atri Banerjee has done in this season’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, creating a fusion of music and theatre in a production that would not be out of place at Latitude.

Shakespeare and live music are hardly strangers. I was reminded of Figure’s 2023 Holland Park production, which recreated Mendelssohn’s complete incidental score on period instruments. Banerjee, however, heads in the opposite direction.

Banerjee, though, uses a more contemporary musical setting, with the fairies performing as a rock band. Reading through the company biographies, this is a stellar crew of musicians, with Rori Hawthorn, Amelia Gabriel, Damien James and Rachel Barnes making up the on-stage fairy band. The music itself, created by Maimuna Memon, was at times haunting and ethereal, and at others pure rock and roll, while the fairy costumes by Tomas Palmer were a punk-meets-New-Romantic mash-up.

Banerjee’s Bottom (Nadeem Islam) is deaf, a casting choice integrated naturally into the production rather than treated as a defining characteristic. For me, the concept worked best in the second half, when Bottom signed while his lines were voiced by fellow cast members. My only reservation was a personal one: Shakespeare’s blank verse is so musical that I occasionally found myself wanting to hear every line delivered directly.

Similarly, among the quartet of lovers, Helena was played by transgender actor Mary Malone, a casting choice that lent an alternative dynamic to the romantic entanglements and particular resonance to the famous height scene, in which Hermia brands Helena a “painted maypole”. Malone also gave a fresh reading to Helena’s famously self-abasing “spaniel” speech, leaning into its fawning intensity with subversive energy that made the moment feel less like straightforward humiliation and more like a knowingly performed act of desperate devotion. The underlying issue is not really about inches; it is about how quickly friendship can give way to rivalry when love and self-esteem are at stake.

The effervescent and convincing Hiftu Quasem made an engaging Hermia, and her chemistry with the other lovers carried the emotional heart of the subplot. Misia Butler’s Lysander took a little time to find his rhythm but grew into the role as the evening progressed, while Terique Jarrett delivered a consistently assured and persuasive Demetrius throughout.

Titania/Hippolyta (Jenny Rainsford) and Oberon/Theseus, her rock-and-roll partner, played by Olivier Huband, both had the stage presence to create a regal setting, though at times their first-half quarrels seemed strained and overamplified to the point of incomprehension. With every player miked throughout, something that the on-stage musical numbers made totally necessary, getting that balance right is crucial.

The team of Mechanicals – Athenian workmen- were ably led by Harriet Gordon-Anderson as Quince, managing to tame the ebullient Bottom and produce a comic mirror to the lovers’ adventures in the forest. The mechanicals’ wonderfully over-the-top performance was one of the play’s most memorable scenes, poking fun at amateur theatre.

And, of course, the production was all pulled together by Georgia Bruce, a Puck with infinite energy who rarely seemed still, darting through the action with the confidence of someone equally at home as musician, movement artist and storyteller.

For me, casting, sound (Max Pappenheim), music and direction were brilliantly creative while the sets (Naomi Dawson) seemed a little dismal in places. ‘Like a school assembly’, my companion remarked to the opening ‘This Green Plot’ set of wooden steps.

I still prefer my Shakespeare unamplified, but Banerjee’s production persuaded me that music can illuminate the play rather than overwhelm it. By the second half, whether through a second glass of wine or the accumulating magic of the evening, the wooden steps had become an enchanted forest, and I was entirely under its spell.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs from 20th June 2026 to 18 July 2026

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
Inner Circle Regent’s Park
London NW1 4NU

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