This delightfully entertaining ‘brand production’, which has been touring the global festival circuit since 2002, opened with the twin spirit Duduri (Puck) urging the audience, in English, to ‘Have fun!’ (see Colour Plate 4). Disregarding A Midsummer Night's Dream's dark undertones, the company presented a colourful, light-hearted production which reflected both the director's interest in comic strips and the aesthetic of cute, rooted in the Japanese cultural phenomenon known as Kawaii which currently pervades Korean popular culture. The production also reflected the three main trends, identified by Hyon-u Lee, in Korean theatre since the 1990s – a decade when the country entered a period of increased freedom and democracy. These trends are the Koreanization of Western drama (in particular, Shakespeare), the growth in popularity of music and musical forms, and the centrality of the theme of feminism.

Drawing on and experimenting with traditional Korean theatre conventions such as Talchum (mask dance) and Cocdoo Nolum (puppet dance), the Yohangza Theatre Company offered a simplified version of Shakespeare's comedy, focusing only on the relationship between the four lovers and the fairy queen and king. All the scenes, therefore, were set in the fantastical world of the forest, and the play in general favoured the mischievous but charming fairies or, as they were known in this, the Dokkebi (Korean forest goblins). Wearing hessian (rustic sacking) over plain tunics, the either masked or heavily made-up Dokkebi were country figures who belonged to a bygone Korea, and their popularity is arguably indicative of the nostalgia prevalent in the technologically advanced, hyper-consumerist ‘New Asia’. In the opening, fog-filled scene, they formed a circle and danced to the beat of percussion instruments, freezing to strike momentary poses of the grotesque. Recalling Shakespeare's fairies’ custom of ‘danc[ing] ringlets to the whistling wind’ (2.1.86), this dance, like all Korean folk dances, originated in ancient shamanistic rituals and was the first of several carefully choreographed sequences.