We sat down for an interview with director and co-director, Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hayat. This co-production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from Shakespeare’s Globe with pioneering theatre company Headlong opens Thursday 27th November and runs until 31st January at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
Q: Why have you decided to set Dream in a mid-20th century world and how will that lens shape the audience’s experience?
Holly A: What a chewy question! I think we are really interested in making a Dream that is properly in conversation with the present political climate, and it feels like the present political climate and the return of fascism across the world have got all their roots in the 20th century. We are borrowing from lots of films and music videos and things that we love throughout the 20th century, but we have loosely landed in the mid-20th century.
Naeem A: I think the biggest challenge about setting a play outside of the period in which it’s written, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, is it often opens up a lot of questions, brilliant and multiple ways of exploring its central concepts. And I think there’s something about us doing Dream in a parallel world, a kind of sideways world, that means that we can ask lots of other questions that don’t normally get asked in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that is often quite soft-edged and warm, whereas we’re doing it in the middle of winter in an entirely candlelit theatre, which means that we can lean into the darkness, and I think that can allow the audience to think about the play slightly differently, and in a less jolly way.
Q: How will the production balance comedy with danger, delight with darkness?
Naeem A: Shakespeare has written such a brilliantly structured comedy, and that means we can pull at some of the darker threads in it, as it is so strange, messy, complex and weird when you’ve got a whole section where people are running around the woods, for want of a better way of saying it, drugging each other. It feels like quite a dark, complicated bit of action. Balancing that with the Mechanicals and the parts of the play that are really brilliantly structured as comedy. I think in order to really hit home with the tragedy or hard-hitting stuff you need a bit of lightness, so that the balance, in order to yield weight, you often need comedy. I think the people inherently in the play are both funny and dark, simultaneously, and I think a lot of the references we’ve looked at have been bits of work that are darkly funny.
Holly A: I completely agree. I think what is terrifically exciting about Midsummer Night’s Dream is that it contains all notes on the piano, but often only the light ones get played; we’re interested in playing the whole piano. In fact, we even have pianos in this production! I think where we’ve ended up as directors is that we want this production of Dream to move people, and to do that we need to make them laugh and make them cry.
Q: What role will the artists reimagined as hospitality staff play in exposing the political stakes of the story?
Holly A: Yeah, so throughout time, lots of brilliant artists are also jobbing, waitressing, and we felt that the Mechanicals were a group of artists, and what are artists doing most of the time to keep themselves going financially? They’re working in hospitality. That felt like in and of itself something interesting to explore, and there is such a steep class structure between those who serve and those who get served. We think that by making the Mechanicals the serving staff at this over-the-top, expensive, elaborate, gorgeous wedding, we will really reveal the inherent class structures in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also lean into the realities of what it means to be an artist.
Naeem A: And that the stakes are really high for the Mechanicals, I think that’s often a thing that goes for free in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we never feel the risk – that them putting on a play is a risky endeavour.
Holly A: Yeah, they are performing at the very banquet that they have been serving at.
Naeem A: And that a great performance could change their lives, and I think that’s what a lot of artists live on – that line of one job changing their life, and it feels like the Mechanicals are at that moment.
Holly A: A Midsummer Night’s Dream could change our lives, you never know!
Q: The production asks what does it mean to dream in 2025’s political climate? How will audiences feel that provocation echoed in the play?
Holly A: I think we’ve been thinking a lot about what every character’s dream within the play is. Not just what is Bottom’s dream, but what might Hippolyta’s dream be, or Theseus’s, and what is the politics of dreaming and who gets to realise their dream versus who gets their dreams crushed. I think in terms of the political climate we’re in, it’s so hard for people right now and it’s hard for people to have aspiration when people are thinking so hand to mouth and day to day, to put on a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream that is about who has the right and who has the privilege to dream, or who gets to dream, or is dreaming free, or is dreaming a human right, feels spicy and interesting.
Naeem A: Yeah, it feels like quite a vulnerable endeavour and exposing to say that you do have aspirations and ambitions in a world that can feel quite bleak.
Holly A: I love that Bottom’s dream is to be a great actor, but he also has that dream to be loved that is met briefly with his experience with Titania. It feels like the dreams are layered in this show and there isn’t one clear dream, and then in a way the whole show is dreamlike, as we haven’t set this in a super-realistic world, we hope that audiences will experience the whole production in a dreamy way.