I’ve never liked Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; he’s often an irritating, high-energy boy flitting about like Peter Pan.

Enter Walter Borden, 82, in an elegant, glittering emerald coat and hat, rolling his wonderful, sonorous voice around Shakespeare’s gorgeous language, not rushing it but luxuriating in it, finding the humour, the pace, the perfect articulation.

It’s a brilliant piece of casting and just one of director Jeremy Webb’s inspired choices as he stirs the pot for a very funny, visually-striking and delightfully theatrical take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a 1920s speakeasy.

The freedom and lawlessness of the Prohibition era suit the chaos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s transformative comedies in which the world is turned upside down so it can be made right again. “The course of true love never did run smooth” is one of the popular play’s most famous lines and the play is about many different types of love.

In the mortal world Hermia loves Lysander and Helena loves Demetrius, who has spurned her for Hermia. When Hermia is exiled for disobeying her father, the four young lovers end up in a forest in a terrible tangle of love triangles, thanks to fairy magic.

Meanwhile, in the fairy world, the queen Titania is warring with the king Oberon over a changeling boy she adopted. Oberon tricks her into falling in love with the Athenian weaver Bottom, who famously is changed into a donkey in this case with a woven basket donkey head – such a refreshing change from the giant, furry head that often turns Bottom into a giant stuffie.

The cast is a bit smaller than usual and the show zips along some parts having been cut. Webb compresses the court scene where Hermia is sentenced to exile in a highly entertaining way using the two tiers of the magnificent set, loud sound and spot lighting.

At other times he stretches out the comedy. The lovers lost in the woods hop about in their sleeping bags – a great idea! Hermia, in a fine, fiery and flustered performance by Sophie Wilcott, plays out her total confusion with great pacing that adds to the comedy.

Gender bending has always been a part of Shakespeare. Here, Webb casts a woman as Oberon, usually played by a male actor as a macho, malicious, fairy king. It takes just a second or two to adjust and then to revel in Emma Slipp’s bold, rich and comical performance. With cropped blond hair and a white military style jacket with gold epaulettes, Slipp’s Oberon is a ringleader, full of declarative theatrical gestures and a commanding voice. The scenes between the king and his inept, wise and recalcitrant servant – Puck – are dryly funny and very rewarding.

Perhaps Titania, finely concocted as a black-clad, sensual and passionate woman by Kait Post, and Oberon are involved in a same-sex relationship or Oberon is a male character played by a woman, as he would have been in Shakespeare’s time. Love is fluid and freewheeling in this play and in a free society. Shakespeare makes it clear that people should be allowed to love and marry whom they choose.

Lysander is also played by a woman, Kathleen Dorian, doubling as the “mechanicals” director Quince, with Kih Becke as the wronged Helena, also Snout, and Santiago Guzmán as Demetrius and Starveling, the “mechanicals” being the working men who put on the famous play-within-a-play about Pyramus and Thisbe.

Another great piece of casting is for the greatest “mechanical” of them all: Halifax actor James MacLean as Bottom. MacLean brings all his intense energy and enthusiasm into the core of Bottom to create a very entertaining, compelling and articulate, theatre-loving character. This Bottom is a real human being, not “just” a lower-class Athenian or a bumbling fool. And when he’s turned into a donkey Webb does not overdo the hee-hawing and the idiocy of Titania’s beloved “ass.”

The design of Dream is outstanding with delicious art deco touches in Holly Meyer-Dymny’s elegant set with stairs and platforms for chasing lovers to Kaelen MacDonald’s wonderfully varied costumes drawing on the period but not overdoing its stereotypical motifs.

The bar easily shifts into a murky, enchanted forest with Jess Lewis’s magical, multi-coloured and dramatic lighting. (The light creates a lot of the fantasy in this production coupled with sound designer and composer Aaron Collier’s spare and effective soundscape with a couple of graceful, jazz-inflected songs.)

Some people don’t like their Shakespeare mucked with but we’ve been lucky this year in Halifax in two creative, entertaining, mind-bending variations: this one and Drew Douris-O’Hara’s twist on Twelfth Night at Shakespeare by the Sea this summer.

While Shakespeare by the Sea expresses Shakespeare’s language as everyday speech, Jeremy Webb does not. There is a hand placed on the theatricality and poetry in the words. All the wonderful language around nature and daytime versus night-time shines out like stars.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs to Oct. 5; tickets range from $33 to $65 (Neptune Theatre). Also in the cast are the fairies: Catherine Richardson/Vanessa Buttercup as Mustardseed, (weeks one and two), and Michelle Langille/Honey De Melle as Mustardseed (weeks three and four). The creative team includes assistant director Gina Thornhill, fight director Dylan Brentwood, Chrysalis costume designer Schuÿler Edgar Holmes, stage manager Kevin Olson and assistant stage manager Alison Crosby.

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Tags: a-midsummer-nights-dream, jeremy-webb, neptune-theatre, review, shakespeare, theatre, william-shakespeare