Each version prompted the audience to respond to and reconsider the three worlds of the play, and its juxtaposition of the mundane and the other-worldly, the aristocratic and the plebeian, the powerful and the love-struck. Neil Armfield’s production of Britten’s opera, first seen in 2009, provides a fairly traditional take on these worlds, but it offers two notable strengths: Dale Ferguson’s remarkably simple yet wonderfully evocative design, beautifully lit by Damien Cooper, and the luminous, carefully calibrated reading of Britten’s score from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Paul Kildea.

Ferguson’s design captures the eye with its draped sheets of green/blue, suggesting both forest and sea, the whole topped by a vast plastic sling, hung from the flies, which fulfils numerous functions throughout the production. At times it even suggests the in-and-out flow of the breath as it billows, sinks, and hovers in the stage space. And Cooper’s lighting is captivating: a remarkable visual equivalent to the rhythm and colours of Britten’s score.

Rachelle Durkin in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Adelaide Festival (Tony Lewis)

However, there are aspects of the production that fail to convince and jell. Foremost here is the semi-spoken Puck of Mark Coles Smith, whose stage business throughout seems to have been drawn from the Anthology of Coarse Comic Acting. And while the temptation to allow Puck to represent the extreme knockabout comedy of the work is invariably strong, it can be resisted (vide Brook and Donnellan). Still, his final exit is a real coup de théâtre: from a raised position upstage centre, as the final notes of the score sound, he takes off into mid-air, before vanishing from view in a semi-horizontal dive that left not just me praying that soft down mattresses were waiting for him.

While this bit of physical business was apt and carried off with admirable élan, I’m not sure that Armfield’s decision to place demands on the performer’s physical and vocal skills was entirely successful. Throughout the first two acts, Oberon makes his entrances and exits in a flown basket, suspended and moved above and across the stage (Peter Brook’s trapezes, anyone?) The vocal demands of the role are hard enough at the best of times, and this seemed a rather unnecessary addition to the singer’s tasks. As it was, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s voice was barely audible in Row Q: it seemed, from what I could hear, a pure and focused instrument, but the dynamic range seemed to stop at mezzo forte. And this was certainly not due to the orchestra drowning either him or the other singers. Throughout the performance, Kildea ensured that the balance between pit and stage was well-nigh perfect: the score glowed and surged where it should, sparkling and whispering by turns.

Cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Adelaide Festival (Tony Lewis)

And yet, pace admirers of the score and Kildea’s own subtle and eloquent support of it in his program notes, is it in the same class as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, The Church Parables, or even Albert Herring? There are whole sections of Acts I and III that sound like superior film music – superior, yes, but still film music. To be sure, these are offset by the strongly characterised writing for the quartet of lovers in the latter third of Act II, the equally evocative and suggestive matching of passages for them early in Act III, and the comic echoes of operetta and light opera for the mechanicals, especially in the lead-up to, and performance of, the Pyramus and Thisbe play within a play. (Standouts here and throughout were Warwick Fyfe’s Bottom and Pelham Andrews’s Snug.)

And while the penetrating yet astonishingly warm and richly coloured sound of James Bowman’s version of ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’ pinned me to my seat on first hearing, and still hovers in my ears, whole sections of the score remind me of nothing so much as the notes I once copied out from Max Reinhardt’s director’s script for the first page of one of his productions of the play. Down the margin, underneath a treble clef and the note MUSIC, he had written the following: Stormwind; Signalfanfares; Horncalls; Battlesong of the Women; Beating of Gongs; Cries and Shouts; Barking of Dogs; Heavy Drumbeats. Of course, Britten’s compositional approach is more differentiated than this. But I can’t help feeling that there are passages in the score that call to mind such a summary approach to musical depiction and underlay.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented by the Adelaide Festival in association with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, will be repeated in the Festival Theatre on March 2 and 3. Performance attended: 26 February 2021.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.