You can fairly bet that when Queanbeyan Palerang Regional Council embarked on building its new headquarters in Crawford Street, it wasn’t expecting to have Shakespeare on site, but director of The Q Jordan Best is taking care of that oversight with her coming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In what will also serve as the effective unveiling of the newly-landscaped Aunty Louise Brown Park directly outside The Q, she will stage a play beloved of even the most ardent Shakespeare-haters.

There is already a theatrical aspect to the park, with a slightly raised auditorium. But there’ll only be one set piece, a hammock and the actors will enter from all over the place. There will be no lights, the show will finish just as it’s getting dark. 

It’s not the first time Best’s directed The Dream; she staged an indoor production at The Q in 2013 featuring a lavish woodland set by Wayne Shepherd. Over the years, she’s also played Bottom, Hermia, Helena, and Demetrius in other productions. 

All of which means she’s pretty well bursting to tell me that she’s got no time for the dark and gloomy interpretations of the play, which have been doing the rounds in recent years, where the fairies are malevolent, power-obsessed beings rather than the light-hearted, capricious ones written by the Bard.

“I just don’t understand why you’d make it dark, it’s a beautiful, silly, wondrous comedy,” she says, “and we are discovering the playfulness of Titania and Oberon.”

And they aren’t mortals, she says, even though in this and most productions they are played by the same actors who perform Theseus and Hippolyta, “but they have all the same foibles as the humans, like the Greek and Roman gods”.

Lainie Hart will play Oberon as a man but not necessarily in a mannish way and with no changed pronouns – “there’ll be no swinging-dick, masculine acting,” Best says. 

She’ll be matched by Kate Harris as Titania in a “delightful relationship with Oberon that lifts the play.” 

The trio of top fairies will be completed by Rachel Robertson as Puck, who is responsible for putting an ass’s head on Jim Adamik playing Bottom the Weaver.

“Don’t forget that they are immortals and they’ve been playing these jokes since time began,” Best says.

There will be no insinuation whatsoever of a sexual relationship between Titania and Bottom and she completely rejects any suggestion of bestiality.

“The text only says he wears an ass’s head, so why read too much into it? Why spoil the silliness and the fun? After all, everybody lives and pretty well triumphs.”

Even the lovelorn Helena, played by Caitlin Baker, gets her man Demetrius and don’t forget, Best says, that Demetrius was originally in love with Helena, so everything has turned out just as it should. 

There are no doubt deeper insinuations in the play, which is essentially about perception, so when the lovers wake up the next morning Hermia says: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double” and Helena responds: “And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own and not mine own,” but such reflections never hold up the action. 

Best has assembled a substantial cast of 21, which allows her to explore the different levels – the fairy world, the Athenian nobles and the Athenian mechanicals, with all their distinctions.

But there’ll be some surprises. Jack Shanahan, who played Mozart last year at Canberra Rep in Amadeus, plays Demetrius as a kind of coke-sniffing yachty, while Liv Boddington plays Hermia not in romantic lead-style, but terrifyingly fierce.

The fairies are played by adults. Titania’s four elves will be androgynous and Puck will have the urban eshay look. The costumes will look as if they’ve been foraged from the costume box of an acting troupe, but will serve to indicate which character is which. 

“It’s a brilliantly written comedy,” Best says. “It’s accessible, it’s funny, it’s ridiculous.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Aunty Louise Brown Park, The Q, opens November 25, then runs November 29-December 15. Bring a picnic and chairs.