A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that deals extensively in what it means to be a spectator at the theatre. Puck's concluding lines, 'if we have but slumbered here / while these visions did appear', poises the theatrical experience as something akin to a Dream. The play interests itself with vision, whether we can truly believe everything we see - fitting for an art form which relies somewhat on the audience imagining what they see before them as 'real'.

Yet this production chose not to emphasise the visual side of things. There was virtually no set, very few props, and costumes (by Michael Mcleod) were fairly simple. The costumes posed a problem in that they pinpointed the fact that this production didn't quite know what it wanted to be: the Athenians were dressed in 50s-styles clothes, the Mechanicals in jeans and whites tops, and Puck and some of the fairies in fairly Elizabethan get-up, which meant that the play lacked coherency from the start.

The lack of set was not a problem in and of itself, but I feel that this play, in its concern with the characters' 'most, rare vision', is one that perhaps needs slightly more visual work than merely green lighting to show a forest. Lighting, however, was used well on the whole - and the scene where the lights were entirely dimmed, so that the audience could see nothing except Puck's torch, was a nice touch. But, there were occasional sloppy mistakes in this area which reflected a trend throughout the production: occasional moments when the characters began speaking before the lights had come on, and when the characters missed their cues, so that the last character to speak had to repeat their last line louder: 'here comes Oberon!'.

There were several innovative and resourceful decisions from the director (Joanna Tang), which added an interesting new perspective on the play. The choice to employ the same actors as Oberon and Titania, and Theseus and Hippolyta, was thought provoking: it brought out the continuities between the roles, potentially compounding the idea of the lovers' experiences as somewhat dreamlike: 'methinks I see these things with parted eye / when everything seems double'. Some of the acting was superb: Oliver Marsh managed to fuse a portrayal of the sensitive side of Lysander with a sense of his more mischievous qualities, and Sarah Wood and Sian Williams, as Hermia and Helena respectively, managed the mutability of the relationship between their characters extremely well.

But by far the biggest problem with the performance was the awkwardness of some of the performances. There was a tendency to overact moments that would have worked better if done subtly, and underact at times when excess was called for. Joe Dixon as Demetrius failed to depict his character's scorn, contempt and rage, leaving his Demetrius a far nicer version of what he should be - and thus somewhat mitigating the potential difficulties an audience might find with the play's resolution. Conversely, Robbie Aird as Oberon seemed far too angry with Thea Hawlin's Puck after the mistake with the the 'Love in Idleness' - and Hawlin herself at times entirely lost the rhythm of her lines.

The Mechanicals replaced the need for genuinely over-done, 'silly', acting with exaggerated hand-gestures. And the entire production, particularly the fairies, tried to demonstrate the play's flow through physical movement - which worked at times but at others seemed ungainly. The production was set in St John's School of Pythagoras, and it made excellent use of the features of the room to bring out parts of the script: Puck and Oberon hide in one of the large, arched windows whilst eavesdropping on the lovers. But, perhaps due to being the oldest building in the college, it was freezing. Of course, this did not impact upon the performance itself, but it made me wonder about the director's decision to stage such an overtly 'summery' play in the bleak of November. Surely The Winter's Tale would have been more appropriate? Or maybe I should have just worn a scarf.