It is only three years since Michael Boyd gave us a brilliant, life enhancing Stratford Dream. Now Richard Jones provides something closer to a gothic nightmare: it has its moments but I suspect it will appeal more to devotees of Shockheaded Peter than to disciples of Stratford's Old Bill.
Jones and his designer, Giles Cadle, do everything possible to create "the fierce vexation of a dream": to that end they draw endlessly on modern horror movies. Shakespeare's Athenian wood, here dominated by a humanised tree with claw-like branches, becomes a sinister conflation of Friday The Thirteenth, Hallowe'en and Edward Scissorhands.
Fast-breeding flies swarm over Cadle's box set, hands emerge through the walls as in Polanski's Repulsion and the transformed Bottom sports a disfigured mask with phallic ears while Puck carries his original head tucked underneath his arm.
Jan Kott first taught us there was sex and horror in Shakespeare's wood and I've no objection to productions that transcend picturebook Victorian sentimentality.
But there is something faintly reductive about Jones's imagery in that it draws on all too familiar schlock movie associations. Moreover Shakespeare's language is treated as if it were an appendage to the visuals rather than the ultimate source of the play's meaning.
Whole speeches are sloughed off so that specific images like Titania's "the fold stands empty in the drowned field", summoning up seasonal disorder, go for nothing; and the sheer wonderment of Bottom's re-awakening, with its biblical echoes and suggestion of journeys to strange, other worlds, loses its potent magic.
But although I found the show over-emphatic, in the style of Jones's sado-masochistic version of Feydeau's Flea In Her Ear, it does have some bravura moments mainly in the second half.
The Pyramus-Thisbe episode is done rather wittily as black clad Greek tragedy. And Cadle conjures up a resonant final image in which the three pairs of married lovers are seen curled up in silk sheets at the open end of a cone like funnel.
Jonathan Dove's score, with its blend of percussion, harp and trumpet, also has a silvery beauty singularly lacking in the speaking.
The acting varies from the capable to the awful. Those who come off best are Tim McMullan as an unusually angst-ridden Oberon, Yolanda Vazquez as a sensual Titania resembling a debauched Hamburg nightclub queen, Darrell D'Silva as a suitably overweening Bottom and Richard Dempsey as a fluting bellows mender suspiciously eager to get into drag as a tragic Thisbe.
· In rep until March 23. Box office: 01789 403403.
