Royal Shakespeare Company to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the road for one of its biggest ever projects

Altogether, 687 people will be involved

An earlier Royal Shakespeare Company production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, a new version of which will be touring the country next year with a cast of 700 from amateur dramatics groups all over the UK (Rex )

It is a project with a grand scale and ambition that would have impressed the Bard.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the road next year for one of the biggest projects it has ever staged – with a cast of almost 700 from amateur theatrical groups around the country.

Deputy artistic director Erica Whyman, who has been working on the project for a year, said that the RSC had never tried anything on the scale of “Dream 2016”.

The production has a core cast of 18 professionals who will perform alongside non-professional actors from 14 am-dram companies from different regions of the UK. The amateurs will take the roles of Bottom and his fellow “mechanicals” (who, in Shakespeare’s play, are themselves a group of inexperienced actors hoping to stage a play for a big celebration: the wedding party of Theseus and Hippolyta).

Altogether, 687 people will be involved; the professional cast, musicians, amateurs and schoolchildren brought in to play the play’s fairies.

The shows will be performed at locations around the country before returning to Stratford for midsummer, when each of the amateur companies will perform at the RSC.

“I’ve always loved touring and care very much about having a proper relationship with regional theatres,” said Whyman, who is directing the show. “I’ve done a fair bit of participatory work with young people and adults. But no one has ever attempted to bring this all together in a professional production.”

The project, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, has been a logistical challenge for Whyman, who has used Skype-style technology to rehearse all the different amateur companies at the same time. The production will travel to nine English regions, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland before returning to Stratford.

“The challenge for me is making sure those regional voices really are in the play,” Whyman said.

This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be set in the Britain of the late 1940s. “It’s about the country coming together after surviving a traumatic time and about the post-war austerity,” Whyman said. “It will have a Dad’s Army quality. That sense of an ill-equipped group of people.”

With RSC associate directors Kimberley Sykes and Sophie Ivatts, Whyman travelled the country from February inviting amateur theatre companies to propose a cast of six for the mechanicals and Bottom. They met almost 600 people and “put them through their paces”.

Companies include the Belvoir Players in Belfast, The People’s Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne, and the Canterbury Players. The amateur actors range from pub landlords to nurses and estate agents. “It’s extraordinary, they go to work and then pitch up in the evening and I tell them how the scene works,” the director said. “It is quite like the challenge set by the mechanicals in the play; a carpenter, tinker and a weaver suddenly having to put on a play.”

Among the 14 Bottoms is Peter Collett, a primary-school teacher in Truro in his 20s, and Barry Green of Bradford, who “is quite a lot older,” Whyman said. Two women will also play the part, Lisa Nightingale in Canterbury and Becky Morris in Nottingham.

Professional rehearsals start in January ahead of the first performance in Newcastle in March. Ayesha Dharker, who plays Titania, said: “They’re saying the professional company will have to make it as comfortable as possible for the amateur actors, but it’s the other way around. They have been preparing for months in a Shakespeare boot camp.”

The actress, who has been in Coronation Street and Star Wars, said: “This is like running away with the circus and I think it is going to be amazing.”