Demetrius - Ben
Lysander - T'Evans
Helena - Bailey
Hermia - Elena
Oberon (and Flute/Thisbe) - Alex H
Titania - Jo
Puck - Emily
First Fairy - Faye
Other fairies - Bedi, Maddy, Gracie
Bottom - Jethro
Quince - Bedi
Snug (and Egeus) - Liz
Snout - Tyne
Moon - Maddy
Hippolyta - KatieAmanda
Theseus - Fed

It is Midsummer Night.
A very short night - we remember:

Fed: Picnic-rugged and mead-oiled, the audience, ready for play, oh! surprised by what they think they know.
Actors, van-tired and tummy-sore meeting in play for the first time.
And in the crowded and stirring yard Lysander and Demetrius cat-calling each other on a wall they don’t know was hand-built by one listener (watching and worrying because the wall is hand-built and he knows there is a wasps’ nest in there somewhere) pawing at each other across a gate and appealing to Egeus wrapped and heavy in Fatherly pain and tummy ache.

Maddy: ...really loved the image of Lysander and Demetrius standing by a flag each on both branches of the stone wall in Act 1. Genius. It was like they could have opened their mouths and come out with so many different pairs of rivals from all throughout the canon - like they were all of them at once but just choosing this thread of the pattern to lead us through.

Fed: Quince’s rehearsal and Flute with his shoulder-high kid because there are no babysitters tonight.
Alex who cannot resist a kid. Alex who is a truffle-pig for them.
...for Act 2 and for the jam in the sandwich of the play, how the audience is moved, a wondering flock, into the Globe - barely defined and fenced from the world by willows growing in the ground and woven into a sketch of a theatre - a loving, quick-handed stick-drawing on wood of a theatre.
A Globe in the world.

Bedi: ...remembers as a fairy trying to singing 'lulla lulla lullabye' serenely, with my head in a cloud of midges ... why was i trying to be serene?
where does it say that fairies don't get irritated by midges? ...

John: Thanks to the midges, every audience member hooded and scarved, watching a bunch of actors with their faces exposed.
It was like something out of Eyes Wide Shut.

Jo: ...saw Catherine posing for photographs in How happy some... Seemed to transform a speech which is often read as self pitying into something playful and flirtatious - saw Helena proving her own worth to the audience.

Fed: Elena climbing through the wall of willow to find her Lysander. The lovers barely making contact with the ground - making instead use of the awkwardness of climbing over and becoming tangled in the undergrowth of the audience.
Bailey’s later imitation of Elena responding to Tim's missing line: “What’s that Sooty? Hate me?”

Maddy: ...player of the day to Tim Evans for extraordinary iambic improvisation, jointly with Grace for Bottom's wreath.

Jo: Gracie making the most beautiful flower garland for Bottom's head from the wild flowers growing around the Globe.

Bedi: ...the next day, finding Bottom's flowery garland discarded and wilted on the side of the stage.

Jo: The moment when Alex (as Oberon) introduced talk of the Changeling child and a baby started to gurgle and shout from the edges of the Globe - seeing Alex's ears prick up…

Alex: 3 or 4 little boys in the front digging holes with sticks but loving it.

Maddy: ...and Jo talking about the baby crying in the audience as the changeling.

Alex:...they were my 'mornings love' with whom I had 'oft made sport'

Fed: Constantly trying to find high places because my Hippolyta was such a tall amazon. Finding a high place to throw the command “uncouple in the western valley” over the western valley stretching beyond the fronds.

Jethro: I'm trying to think of my show defining moment but I was engrossed in my Bottom

Maddy: I was struck by how wonderful Jethro was when we were rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe before the show, and TC said he was going to give really bad direction to Bottom, and then Jethro and Alex proceeded to be completely wonderful and horribly moving.

Jethro: I can't seem to remember a great deal of anyone else's work, ...not sure this is as rare as it should be.

Fed: Tim willingly gulping down mouthfuls of salt ground into his mouth by Emily for the magic flower. Emily's reluctance to make that offer. Jethro mixing his Cobweb with his Mustardseed while trying to balance a traffic cone bedecked with flowers on his head. Tim woken by hounds then kind of making out he was asleep with his eyes open. The undignified and giggly herding of the audience out of the Globe and back to the not-at-all ethereal shed.

Bedi: A young couple in the audience wanting to cry, but still having leftover laughing gasps, at Pyramus's spirit sailing upwards 'now i die' …

Maddy: How in the rehearsal beforehand, Jethro and Alex seemed to become more wonderful when a) given permission to be rubbish but b) given some quite broad brushstrokes - brushstrokes in the sense of giving you different roles in quick succession - you are now a druggie pscycho maniac/ now a mad scientist/ a loving wartime noel coward wife/ a dying man / a hero / an angel in heaven. I wondered if maybe the thing of taking on a different role is quite useful for the actor because it implies a different function, a different job - a different way that you are going to be trying to affect the other person - a sort of other short cut into actioning, or something. Does this make sense to anyone else? I think I'm talking about role and archetype, our shared vocabulary of collectively conscious symbols, still being useful even when doing away with the twentieth century interpretive psychoanalysis-y what-are-you-feeling ideas about 'character'. The word character originally being connected to actual letters on a page, and those letters being derived from physical architectural things (eg.a B meant a two storey house) i think means there is still a lot of use in looking at the symbolism of things....maybe why the titles of the characters in the Seagull are still so evocative. I really like how in the Globe there are still such strong symbols around the place, the pillars of Hercules, the heavens, the trapdoor, the paintings, the whole circularity of the thing - i think given that there was less literacy and it was still more of an aural culture that they would have held on to all the stories attached to those visual symbols more...Romeo having a green beard etc. How broad brushstrokes on the one hand can create room for playing as much as you like with language....or something. Tell me if this makes any sense. All it probably means is that I was gullible enough to think that TC meant what he said about giving rubbish direction, which of course turned out to be genius reverse psychology direction. A ha. Lovely big symbols that give the imagination the gist of the map but not the steps.

Jethro: But what I remember feeling most proud about and keen to tell my missus, is that after I had chosen 2 reluctant Bergamask dancers in Maddy and Grace and abandoned them to come up with some factory magic...

Maddy:... and dancing the Bergomask with such style to Ice Ice Baby.

Jethro: ...I was just beginning to feel guilty for my lack of responsibility and split (involving the Boss' daughter) when the ever useful Hassell Beatbox started up and was followed by the only suitable rap for a production of the Dream on Midsummer's Eve in front of interesting theatrical Hippies in deepest welsh countryside - Vanilla Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby'. Led by the Bailey/Pavli hip hop massive it became my favourite moment of high art meeting low tripe, city wrecking country and old whacking new. I have been trying to imagine an audience less likely to know what we were doing but for the 3 or 4 young'uns who new what was being Rap'd they must have realised just how muthaf*@k&n' cool we are. This moment ecapsulated all that i love about the freedoms and limitations of our aspirations.

Tyne: Alex sitting backstage, swatting the midges,dressed as an Arabian Princess through use of a picnic blanket, before Thisbe's entrance in Act 5.

Jo: Tyne's seemingly innocent decision to make the chink through her legs, descending into the bawdiest comedy possible - real belly laughs in the audience.

TC: Abandon your plans: Alex following this rule by abandoning his habitual 'stop them laughing' schtick with Thisbe's death when a camera clicked and he decided he had to pose for it.

Maddy: And what was cool about not having run it before, was listening to how the iambic pentameter became the train that held it together that everyone just had to stay on in some way or another and the play would happen.

John: That and the fact that it was an utterly brilliant show; here i am, a seasoned factory actor and yet even i found it hard to believe it hadn't been blocked and rehearsed. So fresh, so clear. And another example of why working against the verse is like looking at a Rolls Royce and asking how it would float. Well done everyone. I drove four hours for it and it was worth every degree increase in the world’s temperature that I'll be in part responsible for.

Maddy: And the audience being amazing and infinite in what they would accept as long as they were being honestly acknowledged in the same space - and so overjoyed and relieved to be sharing in it, actively connecting to something not pretending to cope with loneliness. Which is the main thing isn't it? - and the radical thing, that is basically completely opposite to the economic system and therefore all the power play and politics that goes on in most theatre that 'targets' its audience, rips them off with pretty designs, tells them to sit in the dark and shut up...
And I remember the satisfaction of everybody line dancing spectacularly well in the drawing room at 3am…

Jethro: Hope this helps in some way.

Maddy: I now have a big crush on Wales.


TC: ...there.