by BBC South Yorkshire's Oonagh Jaquest

The perfidy of lovers, class conflict, base desire, the battle of the sexes, theatrical metafiction, donkey love....

Bottom (Lee Boardman) gets lots of laughs doing his donkey head routine.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a Shakespearean comedy brimming over with themes and ideas, which is probably what makes it a perennial favourite with the country's examining boards.

But sub-plots, historical context and a smattering of famous quotations do not an engaging piece of live theatre make - in this case it's the quality of individual performances and scenes.

To open the Crucible's Autumn season director Michael Grandage is faced with the challenge of making it all hang together and become more than the sum of its famous quotations, mythical characters and hapless peasants turned into asses.

Romantic comedy

Like Romeo and Juliet, written around the same period, a pair of lovers thwarted by parental disapproval form the initial romantic dilemma of the play.

But it doesn't have the tragedy's doomed trajectory to give it pace.

Throw in another couple, a pair of feuding uber-Fairies in the dream world, their authoritarian Athenian counterparts, a bungling wood-spirit and a play-within-a-play and you've got plenty of food for thought.

But you've also got a piece that stretches the audience's attention span by being quite episodic.

Fairies up to no good: Oberon and Puck.

GCSE students aside, the play's other big fan base has to be lovers of fairies and fantasy - from little girls in gauzy wings being Pease Blossom at ballet class, to grown ups who just fancy a bit of stardust every now and then.

Fairy camp

The Crucible production for the most part chooses to play it straight though, unless you count a recurring comic turn from the camp company of Pease Blossom, Mustard Seed et al in their twinkling bomber jackets.

So the richness and variety of Shakespeare's language shines through - from the peasant actors' ribaldry to the escalating poetic insults exchanged by the quartet of confused lovers.

Helena (Nancy Carroll) and Demetrius (Orlando Wells) get some of the mortals' best lines. The scenes where all four grapple with switched romantic allegiances caused by fairy meddling are well choreographed and introduce some physical humour.

Bottom (Lee Boardman) grabs some of the biggest laughs of the evening with a hilarious, bum-swaying portrayal of a baffled actor whose head has just turned into a donkey.

Samantha Spiro is both luminous and consumate as queen of the fairies Titania - she also plays the mortal Hippolyta, as is customary.

Fairy Queen: Titania injects some fairy colour into a dark wood at night.

The scene where her sprite attendants sing her into slumber with a hypnotic madrigal, winking lights and the swishing of her many hued skirts, produces a pleasantly dreamlike atmosphere.

A little more of this magic would have been welcome to leaven the dark and eerie staging, which as ever at the Crucible benefits from slick production values.

The audience seemed almost relieved towards the end of the play, when the bungling company of actors within the play, perform their leaden tragedy for the newlywed Athenians.

It's a set-piece of skit-like humour and every opportunity for cheap chortles is quite rightly exploited.

Foreboding

The huge papery moon fringed with spikes, which dominates the stage for most of the evening, emphasises a sense of foreboding and the serious side of the play.

Witchcraft and the occult could in Shakespeare's time be both a laughing matter and a dangerous force.

This is a Midsummer Night's Dream which is all about the themes, the verse, the ironies, the language....

It should amply reward the theatregoer who wants to listen and pick up on its many layers, but those in search of sequins and spectacle may be disappointed.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is at The Crucible, Sheffield until 1 November 2003.