A Midsummer Night's Dream, Noel Coward Theatre, review If there is a man possessed by the spirit of the late Frankie Howerd, it is David Walliams in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The star of Up Pompeii! and Carry On Doctor played Bottom in a celebrated production of Shakespeare's fantasy at the Old Vic in 1957. The part - with all those nudge, nudge, wink, wink lines - seemed as if it had been written with the late, great comedian in mind. Now, Walliams, with the same lugubrious, world-weary demeanour, the knowing looks at the audience, and, of course, the ambivalent sexuality, takes on the role in Michael Grandage's version. It is inspired casting. Walliams once played his idol in a television drama called Rather You Than Me, and I wonder if - consciously or unconsciously - he is not playing Howerd playing Bottom. I was beastly about Walliams when he last appeared on stage in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land in 2008, but the part he played then - a monosyllabic heavy - gave him little, if any, opportunity to show off what he could do. Bottom, by contrast, plays to his strengths. There is something rather old-fashioned about his acting style that seems ideally suited to the role. The actor's height and bulk - he is in braces at the outset, looking like Billy Bunter - makes a delightful contrast with Sheridan Smith's petite and delicate Titania. The play is seldom performed in the West End, which may be because it is so open to interpretation. With its interconnecting plots, and its play within a play, it can, with the wrong director at the helm, be all but unfathomable. With what now seems like wilful perversity, Matthew Francis, when he directed the last production in 2001, cast Dawn French as Bottom and it all became far too confusing for its own good. Grandage, however, knows exactly what he is doing with the piece. Like Michael Boyd, in his Stratford production of 1999, he places the emphasis very much on the animal magnetism of the characters, and yet he remains faithful to the original manuscript. Shakespeare has seldom, if ever, seemed sexier. There is no question, when Walliams is transformed into a donkey in the play within a play staged by Peter Quince (Richard Dempsey), that it is an in-joke among the players about how well endowed he is. The audience is mercifully spared the sight of the act of consummation with Miss Smith, but the look of guilt on her face in the second act suggests it was lively. The setting appears to be at some point before the Sixties, and then slap bang in the middle of that psychedelic decade. The designer Christopher Oram conjures up a solid, imposing and claustrophobic backdrop at the outset that hints at the sort of repressive urban dystopia of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It then opens up, as the characters adjourn to the land of the fairies, into what looks like some giant moonlit wonderland. It makes it feel as if, with Puck (a suitably devilish Gavin Fowler) as their supplier, the characters have embarked on a drugs trip, all to the soundtrack of the Mamas and Papas and Simon and Garfunkel. Discarding their heavy period attire and cavorting, in their underwear and shoeless, in their brave new world, the love-struck characters have a ball. Of the supporting players, Padraic Delaney is on strong form as Oberon, and, as Quince, Dempsey achieves an intriguing sexual frisson in his scenes with Walliams. Stefano Braschi - so good last year in The Guinea Pig Club, and, more recently, Peter and Alice - meanwhile demonstrates extraordinary versatility as an energetic and charming Demetrius. Susannah Fielding and Katherine Kingsley beguile as, respectively, Hermia and Helena. I felt, however, for Miss Smith in her scenes with Walliams, as I found it impossible to take my eyes off him, even if tears of laughter occasionally obscured the view. Titter ye not? This great performer had me tittering all night.