Our schoolroom version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has neutered a much darker, sexier play: the ‘dream’ of the title is more Dr Freud than Dr Seuss, and the vanilla framing device of marriage creates erotic space for a much raunchier and riskier set of options, from bestiality to pederasty, from wife-swapping to sexual masochism. This really isn’t a play for children, as a school party discovered at an unexpectedly raunchy Royal Shakespeare Company performance.
