Pop-up Globe, The Entertainment Quarter, Sydney
September 5, 2018

Blood splashes across the groundlings standing in the yard and the crowd roars. The audience at the Pop-up Globe – a recreation of Shakespeare’s second Globe Theatre that has ‘popped up’ in Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter after wildly successful runs in Melbourne and Auckland – has no inhibitions about cheering, booing, clapping and heckling by the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of four productions on rotation at the theatre.

Directed by Dr Miles Gregory, who founded the Pop-up Globe in New Zealand, this production embraces the rawness and spectacle of live theatre with joyous energy, recreating not just the physical theatre – a scale model constructed using scaffolding – but the rough and tumble experience of Shakespeare’s plays (more or less) as they might have been experienced during his lifetime.

Pop-up Globe’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: supplied

In a hilarious production that embraces lively audience interaction, Gregory’s Dream relishes in the clashing of the play’s three worlds. The stifling court of Athens (Gregory sets it in the Jacobean world of 1614) – where Duke Theseus (Jason Te Kare) is set to...