[In the following review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2002 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Richard Jones, Weber notes that Jones's unique and nightmarish take on the play created a kind of “anti-Midsummer Night's Dream” that confounded expectations.]

School's out, which is a good thing as far as the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is concerned. We wouldn't want any unsuspecting English teachers shepherding their sophomores into the Shubert Theater here in anticipation of the gentle, giddy introduction to Shakespeare that has seduced generations. They'd all be perplexed by a production that seems to be willfully unattractive, drained of color and demonic in spirit, as opposed to magical. Of course, 10th graders might very well get a charge out of the director Richard Jones's sense of the perverse.

Still, they'd have to be pretty sophisticated. For what Mr. Jones has concocted here is a kind of anti-Midsummer Night's Dream, one in which the darkness of the forest, for all its fantastical goings-on, never seems to twinkle with the promise of a happy ending. Instead, there's a kind of squalor about.

The production—its set and modern costumes—is entirely in black and white. Enormous flies, fixed to the walls of the primary set—a large black box with white cutouts that makes no pretense to slickness or sharp design—multiply as the play proceeds. The forest is denoted by a single tree, played by a man with a grotesquely twisted set of branches emerging from his collar where his head ought to be. The sounds of the night are batwings, tittering insect hordes and the moans of distant animals. The sprinkling of love potions is performed by disembodied arms: Grade B horror flick stuff.

It is, in other words, a Midsummer Night's Dream to confound expectations, a show that will sit best with theatergoers who have seen this most popular of comedies many times, whose experience will be acknowledged and rewarded by surprise. Even the set seems puckishly referential: a winking variation on the famous white box of Peter Brooke's Royal Shakespeare production of 1970.

If not for fledgling Shakespeare audiences, the production, which continues through Sunday as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, is certainly one for fledgling Shakespearean actors.

Mr. Jones's cast is uniform in its confident diction and deftness with the play's poetics. And even if there are no notably idiosyncratic performances here, the actors all seem well informed of the director's tongue-in-cheek darkness, and comfortable with it.

There's nothing egregious in any performance, not even in that of Bottom, played by Darrell D'Silva with the appropriately unbearable bravado, a very odd haircut and some facial expressions reminiscent of Monty Python's Michael Palin. In fact, the mechanicals as a group, who are goofily dressed up in styleless gray ensembles and whom we first encounter, for some reason, riding a train, constitute their own flying circus.

They do a credible job with the “tedious, brief” tale of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” though anyone who has seen A Midsummer Night's Dream even once before will be impatient with Shakespeare's most overindulgent bit of slapstick.

The Athenians are all very appealing. Peter Lindford is an authoritative Theseus, particularly in the opening scene, and Priyanga Elan is his sexy, steely-gazed Hippolyta. In a brief turn as Egeus, Steven Beard makes his frustration with Hermia's disobedience into a kind of hysteria that testifies to a genuine fear of powerlessness. The four young lovers are slim, fresh-looking and hot to trot.

As Lysander, Michael Colgan, with his shaggy hair, untucked button-down shirt and eager, baffled expression, comes across as the president of the chess club unnerved by an onset of randiness. Paul Chequer's Demetrius is the presumptuous jock; at one point in the forest, he simply seizes the resistant Hermia (Gabrielle Jourdan) and tries to have his way with her.

Ms. Jourdan has a queenly profile and a manner to go with it, and Nikki Amuka-Bird is an unusually but pleasingly reserved Helena, a young woman with the will but not the instinct for the swoon and pout of self-dramatization.

Still, it isn't the real world of Athens that occupies Mr. Jones's subversive attention here; it's the forest, which is a sour place. Oberon (Tim McMullan) is a grumpy monarch, lank-haired and shirtless but in a dark suit; he looks like the unpleasant lead singer of a heavy metal band. And Titania (Yolanda Vazquez), in a dark, seemingly shredded gown and Goth makeup, might well be the guitarist.

Her loyal fairies, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, et al., are dressed all in black, speak in blurts and move with the spastic compulsions that the movies tend to attribute to the terrifyingly insane. And speaking of movies, the donkey mask worn by the bewitched Bottom makes him look a little like Freddy Krueger with mule ears.

All of this turns the forest into the stage equivalent of a bad neighborhood. The set may be abstract, but it still seems creepy and unclean, suggesting the kind of place where miscreants roam. And indeed, such is this production's Puck (Dominic Cooper), whose torso and arms are half-covered in soot and whose mischievous swagger has no pixie in it. He's the kind of sprite who would just as soon rob a gas station as twiddle with the affections of Titania, not to mention mere mortals.

The implication is that the play is not a comic dream so much as a nightmare; the forest scenes have more than a touch of creepy reality. For the lovers, particularly the innocent young women, sex looms not as a reward but as a threat. The anthropomorphic tree takes Hermia in the lascivious embrace of its branches; Demetrius has a bit of the rapist in him, at least until he has his ardor pointed toward Helena, who has already confessed a willingness to be his slave, if that is what it takes to attract him.

And in the monumental confusion before the misdirected affections are straightened out, all four end up breathless and nearly naked.

This is Mr. Jones's triumphant scene. The chaos is complete; comedy is tinged with danger; innocence is threatened; and what has seemed, until now, a careless squalor, has congealed into a cogent and rather beautiful bit of passionate and expressionistic hurly-burly. And though it makes the post-intermission untangling of confusion and the lovers' return to Athens seem anti-climactic, it is, for those who may have already lived through many midsummer night's dreams, a satisfying surprise.