Knight’s Dream at theSpace @ Niddry Street Review
A bar, a bottle of "Love Drug", and Shakespeare's lovers transplanted from an Athenian wood into a sticky-floored nightclub: on paper, Knight's Dream is a good idea. Constance Evans' pop/jazz reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream swaps Oberon for Oscar, a cruel wannabe entrepreneur, and Puck's flower juice for a spiking epidemic, with a bartender doling out the drug to whoever pays. Evans has said she wants audiences to leave laughing, humming and slightly uncomfortable about spiking culture.
It's an ambition the show isn't yet ready to deliver on. The script is the main place that work is needed. A lot of the jokes don't quite land, and more frustratingly, plenty of the best comic opportunities go untaken. There's a rich seam of humour in a Shakespearean love-quadrangle, and the show keeps wandering past it in favour of over-explanation, with characters announcing what’s happening, and then announcing it again in song.
The bigger gap is thematic. Characters are spiked and then the show simply moves on: nobody who did the spiking faces anything resembling a consequence. In Shakespeare, Puck's mischief gets tidied away by magic, but this is a musical that explicitly wants to say something about real spiking, and a story in which the perpetrators walk off scot-free ends up saying the opposite of what it means to.
There were also staging issues. The Lower Theatre is a thrust, and from my side seat in the corner, a table directly in front of me spent roughly half the running time occupied by actors with their backs to my section. Whole scenes played out with myself and those around me entirely unaware of what was happening.
The score itself is promising. It's a fun, bright pop sound with jazz overtones, and the company throws itself at the dance numbers with real energy. But the songs sit in the same tonal register, and by the fourth one they've blurred into a single pleasant haze. The cast are uniformly good and deserve stronger material. Penelope Heydt's Carmen is a vocal powerhouse and Charlotte Teeples is very funny as the narrator-slash-bartender, with a dry, knowing delivery that gives the evening its sharpest edges.
The summary is that Knight’s Dream drifts. It isn't a disaster, just an hour that never quite lands. There is a real musical in here, and with another hard pass through the book and lyrics, the concept could easily earn the stage.
Knights Dream is playing at the Lower Theatre at theSpace @Niddry Street until August 22nd, at 20:50.
★ ★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.