A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe, review On yet another dank, cold night of our wretched spring, this proved a production that warmed the soul even as your feet turned to blocks of ice. Dominic Dromgoole's lively affectionate and consistently inventive staging beautifully captures both the humour and the disconcerting strangeness of the play. The fairies are truly startling creatures here, sporting antlers and animal faces, their bodies daubed with earth. The audience is left in no doubt that Titania's feelings for the transformed Bottom are entirely carnal. In Michelle Terry's funny, touching performance she can barely keep her hands off him and when she first sees him with his ass's head you half expect her to issue a lascivious "phwoar!." Yet there is emotional depth as well as humour in this production. John Light's commanding and highly physical Oberon, who is constantly shinning up the pillars of the Globe's stage on ropes, suggests real shame when he sees his beloved doting on an ass, while Matthew Tennyson proves a fascinatingly ethereal Puck. There is also a beguiling freshness and urgency about the young lovers. You sense the sap rising in these richly comic performances which by the end of the confusions in the Athenian wood leave all four of them stripped to grubby shirts and pants. But the greatest pleasure of this production is the rude mechanicals. They make their initial entrance performing a delightfully nifty clog dance and you really feel these are working men who know each other intimately. Pearce Quigley's wonderfully enjoyable Bottom isn't just the usual vainglorious bumpkin. He suggests a vein of northern melancholy too, and he is also extremely touchy. He reveals his contempt for poor Peter Quince by pretending to forget his name and when he is denied the chance of playing the lion he walks out in a hilarious hissy fit. The climactic staging of Pyramus and Thisby is one of the funniest I have seen, with the actors crammed onto a tiny stage, and sinking their feet through unreliable floorboards that require urgent noisy repairs while the performance is in progress. Yet Fergal McElherron's Quince glows with pride and happiness as the shambolic show progresses, while Christopher Logan's shy Francis Flute ecstatically discovers his feminine side as Thisby. This a joyously inventive and touching production of The Dream, a work that seems particularly close to Shakespeare's heart. Until Oct 10. Tickets 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com