Shakespeare's sauciest rom com is a right old carry on

The Herald Scotland

30-06-2025

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
Don't be fooled by the sound of thunder that opens this seasonal outdoor take on Shakespeare's sauciest rom-com, already seen in several different guises over the last twenty-four years of Bard in the Botanics' summer takeover of Glasgow's leafiest gardens. The sound effect is likely just an in-joke on how many times rain has stopped play over the years.
This weekend, however, the gods - and more importantly, the sun - shone on Gordon Barr's Celtic tinged affair that both sartorially and spiritually seemed to look to the early 1970s free festival scene. This was a time when assorted hippies, freaks and seekers after enlightenment jumped aboard the New Age caravan to get their collective heads together in the country.
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Much of this styling is down to Carys Hobbs' extravagant set and costume design, a magnificent multi coloured patchwork of faux regal exotica. The sound travelling from the two outdoor concerts in Glasgow on Saturday night was also an accidental fit, even if the venue wasn't a muddy field in 1971 in which it looked like Fairport Convention might be lurking behind the curtains.
Once Benjamin Keachie's mercurial Puck has done introductions, we are launched into a freethinking queendom in which love - free love at that - is very much in the air. This is the case for those leading the tribe as much as it is for the four ingénues who have their minds expanded over one very trippy night in the forest.
As Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena play a narcotically induced game of kiss-chase after being intoxicated at Puck's careless hand, the real fun comes with who Keachie's sprite has fall head over heels for the star turn of the local am-dram group.
The twist from Shakespeare's original makes for a right old carry-on that recalls the more mainstream flipside to all that 1970s counter culture by way of prime time sit-coms. This all makes for quite a romp, from the comic sparring between Star Penders as Helena and Lola Aluko's Hermia, to James Boal having a ball as Oberon. Claire Macallister as Titania, meanwhile, has Keachie's Puck run rings round them all.
The Mechanicals too indulge in some serious knockabout, with Bailey Newsome's would-be literary genius Peter Quince desperate to explain the play wot he wrote, while Alan Steele's Bottom is an attention seeking old luv who at one point appears to channel an old Frankie Howerd routine. Quince's royal command performance itself resembles a Crackerjack pantomime in a comic counterpoint to what used to be called the promiscuous society at the end of what turns out to be a good old fashioned sex comedy writ large.