Munya Chawawa Bewitches in Chichester's Rave-Infused Dream

Chichester Festival Theatre — A Midsummer Night's Dream set around a narcotic, orgiastic woodland rave in the summer of 1994 has opened at Chichester Festival Theatre, with comedian Munya Chawawa leading the cast of Justin Audibert and Hannah Joss's exuberant production.

The production's premise rests on a textual hook: Shakespeare used the term "love juice" exactly twice in his entire canon, both times in A Midsummer Night's Dream. That druggy usage — together with Oberon's access to potions that "make eyes roll" — gives the directors their justification for staging the play as a woodland party, whatever purists might say.

The political backdrop supplies the friction. In 1994, Prime Minister John Major was introducing legislation to ban "illegal raves", and the production pits the narcotic revels of the forest against the traditional values of Major's Conservative government.

Several characters have been recast for the occasion. Egeus, an Athenian courtier in Shakespeare's source, becomes Chief Constable of West Sussex, surnamed Anderton — an allusion to Sir James Anderton, a Thatcher ally whose Bible-inspired policing earned him the nickname God's Copper. Henry Everett takes the role. Duke Theseus, meanwhile, becomes the MP for Chichester, a seat the Conservatives held for a century from 1924.

John Major himself emerges as an unlikely stage presence. One character wears Major rosettes on her breasts, and a prime minister long derided as dull is becoming a theatre star: the National Theatre will stage a James Graham bio-drama titled Major next year.

The production joins a growing run of high-profile Dreams on British stages, and Chichester's version stakes its claim on period specificity — the summer of 1994, the Criminal Justice Act era of anti-rave legislation, and a fairy kingdom whose potions read as narcotics rather than enchantment.