Impure thoughts

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out.

Famous, of course, for reviving Doctor Who, Davies here showed a similar fondness for jumbling together different eras — not, admittedly, a betrayal of Shakespeare’s original. The idea that Theseus’s soon-to-be wife Hippolyta was his prisoner of war also has some basis in the play — although the fact she was wheeled into the distinctly fascist Athenian court like Hannibal Lecter was maybe pushing it a little.