A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings War Horse team back together

A Midsummer Night’s Dream ensemble: Photograph: Simon Annand

A pageant of magical and mischief-making puppets is set to descend on Hackney this month as the creative team behind smash-hit theatre sensation War Horse comes together once more to deliver A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the stage.

Marking the first collaboration between South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and director Tom Morris since War Horse, the show is moving from an initial run at Bristol Old Vic in March last year to the Barbican in February.

And where better to pick up the puppet strings again than a play whose comedy hinges on manipulations, meddling and misunderstandings? The line between reality and the fantastical is constantly blurred.

“It’s about transformation and creation – different worlds and realities collide in the woods,” Morris tells the Hackney Citizen. “Puppetry works in the minds of the audience, it’s their imagination that gives the puppet life and this is perfect for a play where the substance and nature of things alter.

“A set of tools can leap together to become a character, a fairy can emerge from a plank. It’s a play where anything can come to life and the wood itself is sentient.”

He says the phenomenal success of their previous collaboration doesn’t mean they took anything for granted when they started working on the new production, which pulls in old as well as new faces.

“Any team working on any show begins from scratch,” says Morris. “We’ve all been aware from the start that we needed not to rest on any laurels or assume anything for the play or the audience. War Horse’s success is fantastic and an incredible thing to have happened – we just need to start from the bottom up.”

So what can we expect? Well, there’s a shape-shifting Puck made out of workman’s tools, an eight-foot Titania gliding over naughty fairies and a towering Oberon manipulating his fairy queen and meddling with the young lovers’ lives.

One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one that has been reimagined a thousand times over hundreds of years. But then, says Morris, that’s only natural.

“It’s always worth remembering that Shakespeare himself was re-interpreting stories in many of his plays,” says Morris. “To that end, to re-envisage one of his plays is simply to carry on in a tradition. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is such a flexible, wonderful piece of writing that working on it is only ever really about finding out some of its possibilities.

“One of its remarkable qualities is that on any given evening there will be many productions of the play across the world and none of them will be the same. It’s impossible to tire of watching a story that can forever reinvent itself.”

Speaking of worlds, this is the last part of the show’s UK leg before it sails off to Asia and then on to the US. Catch it while you can.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 15 February.