I'd love to see this performed - I was cackling away just reading it, so I think it must be hilarious to watch. In truth, I wasn't as enamoured of the fairy parts as the rest. From the moment Puck is given the magic flower you can pretty much see how the confusion's going to go, and though it's mildly amusing the real entertainment here lies in the worst play ever performed, which is so very bad it's genius. Both the rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe and its performance were gleefully, horribly terrible, and all credit to Shakespeare because I'm absolutely certain it takes an extraordinarily talented writer to create something so wonderfully atrocious. The tradesmen roped into performing this monstrosity are utterly hopeless - even (especially!) the one who's dressed up in plaster in order to play a wall. A wall!!! (It's as bad as it sounds, and I was choking with laughter.)

Honestly, I'd have been happy to read an entire play of these awful actors and their appalled audience, who are snarking away like they're on the balcony of The Muppet Show, and cut out the fairy bit entirely. Which was unexpected, given that going into this all I knew about the play was that it had fairies in it, and Puck, and someone wearing a donkey's head. None of which matches up to the glory of the wall and the moon and the death speech of Pyramus, who murdered prose far more brutally than he murdered himself.