Now I'm all for messing with Shakespeare. I love it, I've done it before and I'll probably do it again. The beauty of out-of-copyright writing is that you CAN mess with it. But there's messing and then there's corrupting.It's not that a hip-hop-cum-street version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a bad idea, it's just that it's not well-executed here. If you don't know the story then essentially you have the immortals and the mortals, and, through a bunch of tricks in the woods, all hell breaks loose, with Puck and Oberon grinning away in the background. Sort of. Shakespeare likes to make things more complicated than that.At it's heart though, Midsummer is all about relationships and misplaced trust, and at that level this production is effective. The use of hip-hop stretches to dance-offs and rap battles to settle disputes - a nice touch but often the dancing can feel placed into the script rather inelegantly. The performers are largely talented but there are moments of mis-timed dancing too, which is a real shame.The script perhaps jars the most. It is occasionally witty but the attempt to fuse early modern English with modern street talk (well, street talk from five or six years ago) just jars. I often find Shakespeare in a regional accent works well and it does here, but the flipping back and forth in syntax and style can become difficult to follow.Dancing ability far outweighs acting, but this is a dance company so that is both to be expected and easily forgivable. That said, the players are a great group and the play-in-a-play they put on towards the end is funny and entertaining, if not quite the 'rapera' (rap opera) we were promised. This is a nice take on one of Shakespeare's best-loved comedies and not altogether terrible; it just needs a little longer in the rehearsal room.
