Pop Up Globe Auckland – A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Last updated on 11 April 2018

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The Pop-up Globe’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was spectacular.

Oppressed by a brutal dictatorship, four lovers escape a death sentence by fleeing to an ancient forest. Elsewhere in the woods, a group of tradies secretly meet to indulge their love of amateur drama. But there’re more than just trees in this forest. Ancient creatures of myth and legend haunt the dark corners of the woods, and they love nothing more than causing trouble…- Pop-up Globe

In true me fashion, my friends and I headed along to this year’s Pop-up Globe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you’re unfamiliar with the Pop-up Globe, then it is what you think it is: a replica, pop-up version of London‘s Globe Theatre. Each year the Globe ‘pops up’ in Auckland, at the Ellerslie raceway, and we’re given a couple of Shakespeare’s plays over the course of a few months. This year, the plays were:  A Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the Shakespeare plays that I am most familiar with. I didn’t study it at school, but I remember a movie version of it somewhere, and there’s a snippet of the story in Dead Poet’s Society (which we did study at school). The concept is so incredibly ridiculous and yet it was delivered so excellently by the Buckingham Company, all-male cast.

This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had a kiwi twist on it: the tradies wore hi-ves vests and were definitely kiwi blokes, while the faeries spoke Te Reo Maori. If you weren’t fluent in Te Reo (I’m not), then it was hard to understand what they were saying, but I understood enough words here and there to get the gist, and knowing the story before hand really helped. I love how they added this feature to the plays; it really brings medieval England and little ol’ New Zealand together.

Props to the cast; it was tipping with rain pretty much the entire time. Closing night is the 15th of April, so get in quick if you’d like to see this one!

Have you seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream already? What did you think?