Punctuation: what’s it good for? It’s much a bigger part of our communicating lives then ever before, actually: only consider all those colons and parentheses that are now doing heaving lifting as emoticons. The elegance of a semicolon, the incredulity of an interrobang¹, the wistfulness of an ellipse… the power that these essential marks wield in our perception of a phrase is incontrovertible.

Take, for example, the question mark that raises its brows at the end of the title of Loose Canon’s current production. Really? A Midsummer Night’s Dream? That Shakespeare thing? In this current climate, are you asking us to take fairies seriously? And magic? You want to talk about magic? Who has time for magic? This isn’t going to be a straight version of that old play, right?

Or is it? Despite a raw, rehearsal-room style set design, ragged jeans, DJ decks, and a bottle of vodka, this particular outing in A Forest near Athens isn’t nearly as questionable as is implied in the title. Braced, perhaps, to watch a version that rips through the text for the sake of modernity, it was surprising, if a little confusing, to be presented with something that, despite the bare bones, was a faithful rendering that in many places made the text sing out loud and clear.

To be fair, it’s no great loss to avoid wading through the exposition and getting to the meat of the story: two pairs of human lovers who, due to the battle between the king and queen of the fairies, become embroiled in a heightened representation of the kinds of behaviour that human lovers are wont to indulge in. Jealousy, misrepresentation, brutal truth telling, lust, passion, betrayal – these are all aspects of the kind of drama that fires up hormones but, once burnt out, leaves nothing but ashes behind.

We also dive right into the Rude Mechanicals, who are always meant to be funny but aren’t often funny, and are in fact annoying, which may be down to our desire to identify with the fairies rather than the humble joiner and carpenter and weaver. The show opens with Ger Kelly as Bottom proclaiming that his dream will be written down and told, and so we know where we are: we are in Bottom’s dream, that most annoying of the Mechanicals, the one who should be the funniest but often is not, who is the most like us in all of our defects, who is insufferable – who is, in short, an ass.

This use of the character works, and makes the modern flourishes largely unnecessary. We don’t need to see, projected, a bunged-up clip of an old-fashioned production, complete with enormous petticoats and stagey delivery. We don’t need to be told in another video excerpt that everyone has a different expectation of what fairies look like, and that it can be seen to be the main challenge of any production team of this piece. The decks and cocktails and the cigarettes, okay, that’s cool, but in actual fact, the unadorned presentation doesn’t need anything, nothing but the actors, the text, and the fairy wings.

These fairies don’t hide behind too many special effects. The battle between Titania and Oberon is loud and chaotic and disturbing, but otherwise, we shift from fairyland to human land with a light leap, and the simple and exposed gesture of the removal of wings. In Byrne’s production, it seems that the fairies really aren’t that big a deal, in that they seem to lack all but the simplest of magical gestures, and they really aren’t that different from the Athenians. Is that cynicism, or romanticism in disguise? Are we indeed so little removed from the magical world of the good people? Is that what the question of the title implies? Whose dream is it, anyway?

It may very well still be Shakespeare’s. The play itself is rich and dark and holds up a mirror that, despite being 600 years old, perfectly reflects some of humanity’s least noble qualities right back at it. Even in its abbreviated form, it shines, which in this instance is all to the credit of the director and his cast. Whilst the blocking seems to be wanting in variety, and the more rebellious aspects of the design were vaguely employed, the characterizations were solid, the doubling and tripling worked to great effect. Phil Kingston’s Puck, in particular, suggested a world weary and vaguely annoyed sprite who is fed up with the whims of his boss, and the actor’s transition to Demetrius, who was equally fed up with Hermia and Helena, was flawless. He and Barry O’Connor’s Oberon elucidated the pair’s power struggle that you don’t often get to see when there’s too much posturing and fairy dust flying about the place: while O’Connor’s Christopher Walken-esque delivery took some getting used to, it added a sinister quality that made all of Puck’s girdling of the earth that bit more urgent.

Despite the punctuation, this is definitely A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Full stop. At the end of the day, the play was the play, rendering that curious question mark a minor fillip that seems superfluous.

Susan Conley is a cultural critic and author.

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