A MIDSUMMER Night's Dream is Shakespeare's most performed comedy, a supple piece over which many a magical wand has been waved.

The tale of the Amazonian queen, the fairy world, the young lovers, the rude mechanicals and the Bottom who makes an ass of himself was last staged at the Theatre Royal by John Doyle in 1993 when Puck was a middle-aged Glaswegian woman, and a mozzarella cheese dome dominated the stage.

This is the thing with Dreams: they can take you anywhere, and this time Christopher Madin's trippy, mood-enhancing pre-show music with vocal overdubs is like one of those ambient relaxation tapes for the chill-out zone. Or maybe bath time, for at the heart of Dawn Allsopp's curved, walled and gauzed stage structure is a circular pool, on to which rain will fall like the water sculptures in the West Yorkshire Playhouse's splash hit, Singin' In The Rain.

The design is as elegant as a Roman bath or Cleopatra's palatial pad, yet initially stark and sterile to match the sang froid between Hippolyta (Andrina Carroll) and Theseus (Gareth Tudor Price), but the seven doors are in the tradition of a French farce, a signpost to 'Midsummer's' comic potential.

Joint directors Damian Cruden and Lucy Pitman-Wallace decided to eschew a naturalistic forest in favour of a dreamscape of the imagination. Hence water, rather than greenery, and what an aid to magic, dreams and mayhem it is.

Add the lanterns and multi-colourful streams of material in the fairy world and it becomes oriental; add the face-covering head-gear for Cobweb, Mustardseed and co, and it could be the Arabian Nights; add the slapstick finale of the mechanicals' sham play and it could be somewhere beyond the Fringe.

By the end, the theatre tumble dryers must be on overtime pay, because so many characters take to the water in their long, 'floaty' linens and pleated silks: Titania (Carroll again) suspended in her dream; the plotting Oberon (Tudor Price) and his meddlesome agent Puck (a gymnastic, Irish Michael Glenn Murphy) and the four water-fighting young lovers (Katherine Kelly, James Garnon, Ben Warwick, Nicola Barber).

Be prepared for a David Beckham-patented goal celebration from Oberon, Malcolm Scates's hee-hawing Bottom and a snappy running time of 150 minutes: yet more reasons to smile in this theatre of dreams and water sports.

Box office: 01904 623568.