Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is his most magical and most perfect comedy. It is colourful, spontaneous, poetic, hilariously funny, teasingly sinister and satisfyingly cyclic. Its appeal is universal, and it encourages both cast and audience to indulge their imaginations. It has been lighting up theatres all over the world for generations. It appeals to the human love of mischief, and exists in the illusive sphere of dreams. Most of all it is wonderfully entertaining and wholeheartedly theatrical.

'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is set in two words. There is Athens - a pallid, boring place where order, hierarchy and decorum form the rigid parameters of a constrained style of living. Then there is the Wood - a magical place without boundaries, where fairies are in control, and life is turned on its head. Our production is designed to hinge on the connection between the two words. The wood is Athens turned inside out. It is the topsy-turvy, irrational side to human consciousness, the unconscious brought to life. It is a dream itself.

Our production is set in Victorian Britain. This is based on two modern-day preconceptions of what this famous age was like, which correspond neatly to Shakespeare's Grecian settings. Athens is upper-class nineteenth-century London. It is grey, angular, sensible, mannered, adult. Theseus's court is a like a Victorian drawing room, with piles of neatly arranged books, where 'children should be seen and not heard' and the judgement of the father is final. The Athenian Wood is the rest of London - the Victorian Labyrinth in Technicolor. The darker, more subversive, more alive, more dangerously spontaneous atmosphere of a Dickensian metropolis meets an exotic jungle, an endless wood full of surprises.

With a cast of eleven, and minimalist design, coupled with music and dance, Pembroke Players's production promises to be a dynamic and exiting revival of Shakespeare's classic.

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