Sadly, the 2009 production at the Festival Theatre has neither charm nor magic to offer dreamers, and it's not recommended for children. Further, in many scenes the director, David Grindley, failed to make up his mind whether he had a comedy on his hands or a farce. There is a difference, in case he hasn't heard. As for the love poetry, it somehow got lost in this muddled production.

Grindley is Britain's latest directorial Wunderkind, who made his name staging Othello as a female and Desdemona as a male. He solidified it with his restaging of Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, in which he reveled in the nihilism of punk rockers by using The Sex Pistols' version of God Save the Queen in the final scene.

This nihilistic attitude is highly noticeable in Midsummer Night's Dream because Grindley has turned Oberon and Titania, and their flock of fairies and pugs into leather-clad, tattooed and black-nailed punks and goths, whose hard-rock music sits heavy on the ear instead of dreamily soothing. Doesn't he realize how boring and shop-worn this attire has become, as have the dark glasses worn by Puck. Worse still, one is confronted with one of the fairies casually smoking a joint. This is a smirking challenge to the sensibilities of the general theater-going public; it also tries to appeal to the easily swayed younger public, who see Michael Jackson as the 'greatest artist' of the 20^th century.

Dion Johnstone clearly takes his cue for his Oberon from Jackson's struts, while managing to convey the bard's language with ease, though not with poetry. The much-lauded Yanna McIntosh in the role of Titania, however, seems to have difficulty getting her tongue around it, leaving one wonder what she has said. As Shakespeare wanted, one expects some sexual tension between the warring king and queen of the fairies, yet none is apparent in this production.

As Robin Goodfellow, or Puck as he is more commonly called, Tom Rooney is a lanky, tight-panted, self-absorbed, prancing creature, who is not so much a light-hearted mischief-maker, but more of a malevolent trouble-maker. There are no amends for his performance because his epilogue, "If we shadows have offended . . . And Robin shall restore amends" is made ineffective in the tumultuous, full cast disco dancing finale, choreographed along the lines of the Macarena.

What makes this production all the stranger is that Grindley has set the mortal world in 1950s Greece, at that time involved in a lengthy struggle between the left and right following WWII. Perhaps this may explain the gunfire the audience hears at the beginning of the play. There is no other reason for it.

What Grindley has created must be classified as regietheater. This theater format allows the director to take the liberty to change the original intend of a play or opera to fit his own idea, supposedly to suit modern times. It originated, some say, with Wieland Wagner after WWII when he wanted to free his grandfather's operas from the stigma of the Nazi era. Unluckily, it was taken up by East German theater on the pretense of deconstructing bourgeois plays to suit communist norms. It wasn't long before West German directors followed, and eventually the method spread across Europe. It now has begun to find a fairly firm footing on this side of the Atlantic, much to the loss of good theater and opera. Some of the reasons for the loss is not only the removal of the true meaning of a play, but because regietheater directors usually have a very dismal view of the world; they leave the audience with no hope, and at the same time they talk down to a well-informed public.

For the most part, regietheater is practiced by what appears to be frustrated individuals who haven't the talent to write their own plays and so destroy someone else's work. This is very apparent in this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. One also wonders if Grindley has ever worked with a thrust stage before. More often then not he has the actors speak to the back of the stage rather than to the sides so the audience can hear them. That is clearly a directorial failure.

The two pairs of young lovers, Hermia (Sophia Walker) and Lysander (Gareth Potter), and Helena (Laura Condlln) and the reluctant Demetrius (Ian Lake), have been turned by Grindley into objects of farce and derision. They tear off each other's clothes in a surprising act of prurience, and Helena follows Demetrius around on her knees and hands in imitation of a lap-dog, all for cheap laughs from a few of the audience.

The only character true to Shakespeare's intend is Bottom, played as he should be by Geraint Wyn Davies. Yet, even here the production goes for gimmicky laughter. Puck uses his winkle picker shoes to turn them into Bottom's donkey ears as the unfortunate mortal takes on the shape of an ass with buck teeth. It fails to come off and the bewitched Titania's sudden love for Bottom in the form of an ass becomes unbelievable.

Only the seven rude mechanicals, as Shakespeare called the tradesmen in this play, including Bottom, carry on as they should. Their amateur production of The Death of Pyramus and Thisbe takes the comedic turn it should, being as Lysander reads: "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/ and his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth." Sadly, no mirth can be found in the rest of this production.