If you have traipsed across an unlit park on a chilly November night to sit in a tent and watch a show about summer revels, the chances are that you are determined to have a good time. I must report that many of the audience in the (well heated) big top pitched by travelling theatre company Footsbarn were positively rapturous about these two hours in the enchanted Athenian wood but for me it was one of the longest and most dream-free nights of the theatrical year.

Footsbarn pride themselves on the carnival atmosphere of their shows, with onstage musicians, masks and colourful costumes but jolly japery can only go so far. Here, unfortunately, it hardly goes anywhere, as the acting is almost uniformly woeful. An international cast, a couple of them with prohibitively strong accents, do things to an iambic pentameter that would make your eyes water.

Despite an elaborate set of greensward dominated by a large, gnarled oak, director Patrick Hayter gives no sense of magic that could work for good or evil, or young love that is truly in peril. Instead it’s all — too often literally — bells and whistles, as the intrusive noodlings of the musicians vie for aural supremacy with the mangling of the verse.

There is furious mugging from nearly everyone, not least the rude mechanicals, who have never before made the tale of Pyramus (peculiarly pronounced here Pyr-AH-mus) and Thisbe more tedious and less brief.

Caroline Piette’s Hermia gives fleeting glimpses of the way the lovers’ trials, oddly truncated at the conclusion, could have been anchored in some sort of emotional veracity. Nonetheless, she has an unenviable choice of suitors, as both Lysander and Demetrius look as though they should be getting their OAP bus passes rather than their wedding certificates. When Muriel Piquart’s gurning Helena declares herself spurned by everyone, we can’t help but feel she’s got the better deal.

Novelty seekers might give this a try. Everyone else is strongly advised to wait for the superb RSC Dream that is coming to the Novello in January.

Until 30 November (0844 755 0017,
www.footsbarn.com).