Bottom sniffing cocaine whilst working as a head chef, expletives in between the iambic pentameter, handguns, the music of Black Sabbath and strains of Robbie Williams’ Angels: welcome to A Midsummer Night’s Dream chateau 2026!

And what a murderous slice of warped brilliance from the hand of director, Holly Race Roughan, this nightmarish production turned out to be: Heaven preserve any psychotherapist delving into the annals of her mind!

Blessed by Leeds Playhouse, Headlong (famed for their left of centre productions) and Shakespeare’s Globe, you have just 10 days in which to witness one of the decade’s more unusual takes on perhaps the Bard’s most famous mixed identity comedy.

However, despite being hilariously funny in parts, it was also tragic and thought provoking, leaving you momentarily silenced at lights down.

No spoilers, but I did NOT see what was coming as Puck, dressed in a tutu with his Marcel Marceau style white face, spoke his final lines surrounded by bloodied bodies.

Turning in his grave? Probably not but only because Mr Shakespeare was not around to see what the cast driving this tripart production have done to his work, stretching it from corner to corner into something still resembling the original, but only at the corners!

However, I LOVED this brilliantly innovative production and its near Downton Abbey setting, laughing out loud in a way that only an academic with a fuller understanding of the nuances should!

Without doubt there are some wonderful actors on stage – Danny Kirrane as Bottom, Hedydd Dylan as Hippolyta/Titania, with an outfit straight out of the Kate Bush Wuthering Heights collection, and……..well, there are too many to mention: all excellent.

In the same way that an F1 car can only reach its potential in the hands of a great driver, so it is with a play: this time the finished production in the hands of uniquely talented performers delivered something greater than the sum of their individual parts.

What I did like was how Holly Race Roughan turns the play on its head, not only setting it in winter, but bringing a touch of modernity to something inherently Elizabethan, using the sense of surprise, or frustrations, of certain characters to introduce of-the-moment language: “…is he chuffing laughing at me?” blurts Bottom!

He even chides Peter Quince for taking them to a ‘shithole’ in which to rehearse their play for the Duke’s wedding banquet: absolutely hilarious!

As the sound of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs resounded round the theatre and implied oral sex had taken place between Bottom – now an ass – and Titania, I knew that here was a production that had given Shakespeare’s sacred work a rectal douche and, I have to say, I haven’t laughed so much at a Shakespeare play in years. Superb!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Leeds Playhouse
Until Saturday February 28th