Director Emily Lim on the conversation with Michelle Terry that shaped her production, the moment in Titania’s story that Shakespeare leaves unresolved, and why every audience member becomes part of the company.
Directing a play that’s been performed for 400 years is, in Emily Lim’s words, “a crazy experience.” “It’s a wild experience doing something that has been done for 400 years and that has been really loved and really played with, where there have been these really iconic performances and interpretations,” she says. “There’s definitely a feeling of pressure that I think myself and the creative team and the company all had to really try and relieve ourselves of.”
It’s also, she’s quick to add, “a real privilege. You feel like you’re part of a cultural journey and something that’s really iconic.” And that mix of pressure and privilege, reverence and the urge to shake things up, sits right at the heart of her new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe.
A conversation with Michelle Terry
The production began with a conversation. Globe artistic director Michelle Terry approached Lim some time ago about directing Midsummer, aware that Lim’s practice as a theatre-maker has always centred on community-building.
“She said: what if you brought those values to this play, which in lots of ways is a play about how we choose to love and look after each other?” Lim recalls. “I thought that was an amazing idea, and something that I could really start to get my teeth into.” From there came a real instinct to “poke it and pull it in different ways and see what it could take,” to bring, as she puts it, “our very own special sauce” to the play, and to be brave about doing so.
Finding a way in through the mechanicals
Lim’s route into the story was through Bottom, Quince and the rest of the mechanicals: Shakespeare’s “everyday, hardworking people of Athens,” as she describes them, a group of amateurs simply trying to put on a show.
“They’re just a bunch of normal people who are trying to put on a show, which is so brilliant and such an honest and humble and funny and human experience that sits right at the heart of the story,” she says. It spoke directly, she felt, to her own belief in theatre as “a place for building community, where communities can see themselves and re-see themselves through the sharing of stories and the making of stories together.”
From that entry point came the production’s boldest idea. “What we’ve done with our interpretation, which I haven’t seen before, though I’m sure it’s probably been done across 400 years of this play, is to turn the whole audience into the mechanicals,” Lim explains. “We are all part of this community theatre troupe together.”
The source material, she’s found, can take that kind of handling. “It can take a lot of pushing and pulling around, and you can run around inside it and have a bit of a romp and a riot and learn new things. And audiences are meeting it with such joy, which is the one thing that we most wanted to bring to people.”
Holding the darkness and the light
For all its riotous comedy, Lim was equally drawn to what the play leaves unresolved, particularly around Titania. “One of the biggest pulls in the story, and something that I think Shakespeare both does and doesn’t deal with, is the taking of the child from Titania by Oberon,” she says. “When Titania wakes up, there is a scene where she has essentially nothing to say for herself, and she doesn’t get a chance to express any kind of feeling around what has happened to her.”
That silence became a way into the production’s emotional core. “For us, that became the idea of parentage, what that means, and how couples deal with all the very strong and complicated feelings that come when children enter your lives, and disrupt your love, and change your love, and change the shape of you,” Lim says. “That became a very important thread through the story with us, which held a lot of tensions and a lot of different feelings, and became something that was really, really crunchy in rehearsals to explore.”
Balancing that darkness against the play’s exuberance, she says, is one of the production’s central challenges, and one of its greatest artistic joys.
Meeting the Globe’s audience
Much of that balance, Lim found, only truly revealed itself once the production left the rehearsal room. “There was obviously only so much that we would know in rehearsals, performing to ourselves in a relatively small room, given the size of the space we were going to move into,” she says. During the process, the team brought in test audiences to help work out which ideas landed. “But then in previews, things really started to take shape and come to life. The first preview was an amazing moment, where the audience first properly met the story, and we realised, fingers crossed, that we think this is going to work.”
The Globe itself, she says, is uniquely suited to the show’s ambitions. “It’s amazing because of how communal it feels. It’s a huge auditorium, there’s so many people in there, and yet it feels so intimate.” The theatre’s team have told her it’s one of the spaces that leans most wholeheartedly into direct relationship with its audience — and the groundlings, in particular, have struck her. “They are an audience like no other. They are so generous, so up for it, really unpretentious. It feels like a real gift to share a show with people who are so ready for it.”
Joyful, human, community
What Lim wants, above all, is for people to leave feeling like participants rather than spectators. “I want people to walk away having had an absolutely brilliant time,” she says. “I want them to feel like they came here and did something: they did something together. They mattered. They weren’t just passive audience members who witnessed a thing. They partook in a thing, and they made a thing happen.”
She wants them, in short, “to feel magic. To feel alive.” The play, she points out, gives her every excuse: “There’s loads of it that’s ridiculous: absolutely absurd, silly, bombastic, and we’ve really leaned into that and celebrated it.” But she’s equally moved by Shakespeare’s reach beyond the comedy.
“He has an incredible way with words, and is able to access human feeling and translate it into poetry. There’s lots of people seeking to make meaning in different ways, reaching towards understanding what magic is in the world. That’s a really core part of his worldview in this play.”
Asked to sum up her Midsummer Night’s Dream in three words, Lim doesn’t hesitate: “Joyful, human, community.”
Watch the full interview – click below
Shakespeare's Globe, London
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