The RSC's digital Midsummer Night's Dream: lunatic or inspired? The first scene will be relayed at 8pm tonight online as it's performed by an RSC company - composed of members of four previous Dream productions - but the public won't get anywhere close to the action, physically, in Stratford-upon-Avon. In a ground-breaking initiative called Midsummer Night's Dreaming, delivered in substantial part by Google's creative division, the action will primarily be experienced at one digital remove through a dedicated website - dream40.org - which has already gone live. This site will anticipate, comment on and follow Shakespeare's action - as enacted largely unseen by the RSC cast - using specially devised materials, whether it be tweets, animations or other postings, and will draw too on material supplied by the online world. In other words, it will be the buzz around the events - some of it generated by 35 ancillary characters, specially created for the occasion - that takes centrestage. Collinge says the company learnt a huge amount from that experiment: "The one big lesson we learnt was that we should have writers posting and not actors - and we wanted more ways we could respond live. The volume of tweets that the actors had to do was too large - and of course they're actors not writers. Here the in-situ team has already created a thousand pieces of content and more will be forthcoming as the action shifts from Athens to the Athenian forest - which Collinge likens, in its anything-can-happen nature, to the internet itself. Preparations are under way for Midsummer Night's Dreaming Not all that far-fetched - of course where Puck says he will put a girdle "round about the earth in 40 minutes," Google can do that in 0.004 of a second - the kind of magic wrought by the fairies is akin to the marvels of modern technology. Collinge is convinced that a deeper contextual understanding of the play can be achieved using these new tools. It will take us deeper into the play. It will make explicit some of the themes you may not be aware of at a first sitting - we're talking about climate change and misogyny, some of the things you may only gradually register. It's going to be interesting to have characters provide more context. We don't provide the answers, though - we're asking questions. Her timetable between now and Monday morning is going to be as full-on as Robin Goodfellow's. The dramatic action is being specifically mounted to coincide with temporal markers in the text - so the actors will convene in the early hours - 2.30am - of Sunday morning to take us from Act 2 to Act IV. Then on Sunday afternoon, from noon, there will be open-to-the-public rehearsals in Stratford, a pop-up performance and family-friendly workshops around the wedding theme. Later that night everything concludes by the banks of the Avon, with RSC artistic director Gregory Doran bringing the play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe to new life before the bells of Holy Trinity Church sound midnight and it's spit-spot, trippingly, to bed. As if that wasn't enough to be getting on with, come the following morn, there should be a full audio version of the production, with related digital clips, ready and waiting on the RSC site. "I've just had a meeting to discuss who is going to sleep, and when," Collinge reveals, holding out little hope for herself, as she puts the finishing touches to her cherished Dream. Will it all turn into a nightmare? Who knows - but I suspect that those who participate may end up scratching their heads in wonderment, as Bottom does on rousing after his transformation, and saying in awe with him: "Man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say, what me-thought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was...