This is where it all began for me. It was 1951. I was seven years old, a Londoner born and bred. BBC Children’s Television was showing something called A Midsummer Night’s Dream in two consecutive Sunday afternoon instalments. I was vaguely aware of the name “Shakespeare”; also of the name “William Shakespeare”. I may have thought they were two separate people. I certainly had no . . . particular interest in him or them, or in whatever he or they may have done. But there wasn’t much kids’ TV in those days, and I always watched whatever was on.

The play was introduced by Robert Atkins, a veteran actor-manager both rubicund and orotund, whose past achievements included establishing the Old Vic Theatre as London’s “home of Shakespeare” in the early 1920s. Not, of course, that I knew anything about that or would have understood it if I had. All I knew was that I totally failed to follow whatever Mr Atkins was saying, though I imagine he was giving us a synopsis of the play and that I maybe got lost among the proper names. So when the play itself started I expected to be similarly baffled. In fact I was hooked and enchanted; and I understood everything.

It probably helped that I was watching a severely cut version of the play: two-thirds at the most. The human lovers had gone entirely. All that remained was the clowns and the fairies; oh, and the Mendelssohn music. I especially loved the clowns, and the tripping tune that ushered their scenes. Atkins himself played Bottom (a role that, at the time, he practically owned); I have no real memories of the production but I imagine that he lacked nothing in booming self-regard and that Pyramus-and-Thisbe was a hoot.

That television treat may have been the defining cultural moment of my life. It led me to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare led me to the theatre. It also led me to my parents’ bookcase and to their one-volume Collected Works in which, with doubtless shocking precocity, I immersed myself. I acquired a working knowledge of the plays—all the plays—at a disgustingly young age.

It was four years, though, before I got to see the Dream on stage: at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, which was then considered the play’s natural London home. Once again Robert Atkins was playing Bottom; he was also the director, of the play and of the theatre itself. The park had a low critical reputation at the time, and I’m sure that the production was conventional to a fault or beyond (Mendelssohn again), but I enjoyed it. Atkins’ performance was as rich and fruity as ever, and the mechanicals’ play as riotous. Robert Eddison, an oddball great actor, both mellifluous and idiosyncratic, played Oberon, and this time of course we got the whole play, the four lovers very much included. Their scenes were an unexpected gas; Plays and Players, a magazine of which I had recently become a regular reader and to which years later I became a regular contributor, summed the foursome up in a sentence that has stayed with me: “We see them, as we should always see them in this whimsical marriage play, affectionately but through laughter”. That gets it absolutely right.

A couple of years later (1957) I was seeing the Dream again, this time indoors, at the Old Vic. A great comedian, Frankie Howerd, was making his first classical stage appearance as Bottom. (Also, I think his last, unless you count Charley’s Aunt earlier and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.) He was hilarious, as were all his fellow mechanicals; this Pyramus and Thisbe was the funniest ever. But the rest of the play didn’t suffer for it; indeed Coral Browne as Helena gave the clowns serious competition: affectionately but through laughter indeed. It was in fact an uncommonly well-balanced production (by Michael Benthall). It remains, after all these years and making all allowances for youth then and nostalgia now, my favourite Dream.

There have been countless others since, including the legendary Peter Brook staging (1970) for the Royal Shakespeare Company, probably the single most celebrated Shakespeare production since the end of World War Two. Perhaps uniquely, and to my eternal chagrin, I neither loved nor hated it. It triumphantly abandoned traditional settings, its all-white box set proving as magical as any amount of greenery, just as the circus techniques—juggling, swings, trapezes, plus the unbeatable performances of Titania (Sara Kestelman) and Puck (John Kane)—proved a wonderful way of presenting the fairies: otherworldly in their powers, all too human in their emotions. The play’s other components didn’t fare as well.

The lovers got the conventional comedic treatment: correct but hardly revelatory. The clowns made a lot of noise, but other productions have made them both funnier and more endearing. During my ten years (1973-84) as critic of The Observer I saw at least two productions that I enjoyed more: one by John Barton (1977), the first time the RSC ventured to challenge memories of Brook’s Dream (with the late lamented Richard Griffiths as Bottom and Patrick Stewart as Oberon); the other at the National Theatre (1982), directed by Bill Bryden, who had for some years run his own company-within-the-company, composed mainly of British regional actors who had lit up everything from medieval mystery cycles to David Mamet, and who now gave firmly rooted performances of the “hempen homespuns”, with Paul Scofield brought in to play Oberon, to the beauteous Titania of Susan Fleetwood.

The productions of Benthall, Barton, Bryden and especially Brook (the alliteration magically suits the play) each had it its own identity; something that many Dreams have lacked. With the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet, it’s now the most popular Shakespeare play (i.e. the one that theatres find most marketable to kids—a belief, bearing in mind my own initiation, that seems justified).

In all my time (1999-2018) as theatre critic of Canada’s National Post, it seemed I could never get through a year without having to see at least one production of the Dream; a few were memorable (Kate Lynch’s Amazonian i.e. all-female interpretation at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, open-air stagings by Miles Potter and David Ferry in Toronto’s hinterlands, Chris Abraham’s sumptuously-set Stratford Festival version which again left me marooned among my colleagues in neither loving nor hating it), but the others blurred into one another, even while I was watching them. Most productions strain to make the play more than a culturally-approved pantomime; some even succeed. Keeping the different components in balance is devilishly difficult; I found this out the hard way when attempting to direct the plays as an undergraduate. It’s hard not to fall back on old tricks, or to get heavy-handed in the effort to avoid them. This, above all plays, calls for a lightness of touch.

When it can be achieved, when we can appreciate the dazzling ways in which the different levels and groupings, not only co-exist but interpenetrate, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its extraordinary cheeky epilogue both disconcerting and disarming, can be a theatrical experience unlike any other: beautiful, hilarious, dazzling. Metatheatrical too: could it be the first example, the first play to incorporate the rehearsal and performance of another play, and to satirise itself in doing so? Probably not, but it remains the richest. Is there a lovelier moment in drama than Bottom’s awakening from his “most rare vison”? In theory A Midsummer Night’s Dream is still my favourite play. And sometimes the theory becomes practice, and the dream is real.