The ballet was presented to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. Ashton drastically trimmed Shakespeare's plot, discarding Theseus and Hippolyta and the play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe. The focus of the ballet is on the fairies and the four lovers from Athens lost in the wood. Lanchbery adapted the overture and incidental music Mendelssohn had written for the play in 1826 and 1842. Ashton and his designers, Henry Bardon and David Walker, set the action in or about the 1840s.
Plot
Four young Athenians, Hermia and Lysander and Helena and Demetrius, are in romantic turmoil. Hermia loves Lysander but her father insists that she must marry Demetrius. The latter has switched his love from Helena to Hermia; Hermia is unmoved and Helena is distraught. Hermia and Lysander escape from Athens, with Demetrius pursuing them, and himself pursued by Helena. In the forest outside Athens Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen, Titania, have quarrelled because she refuses to give him her Indian changeling boy as an attendant. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's defiance; he sends his servant, the mischievous fairy Puck, to find a flower called "love-in-idleness". The juice from this flower, if squeezed on a sleeping person's eyelids, makes the victim fall in love with the first living thing seen on awakening. Oberon intends to humiliate Titania by making her fall in love with some monster of the forest. Into the forest come a group of workmen, the "rude mechanicals". One of them, Nick Bottom, is isolated from his colleagues, and Puck casts a spell to give him the head of a donkey. Oberon squeezes the flower on the eyelids of the sleeping Titania, who, on waking, sees the transformed Bottom and falls madly for him. Oberon takes an interest in the Athenians, and instructs Puck to use the juice of the flower to make Demetrius fall once more for his former love, Helena, leaving both couples happy. As Puck does not know which of the lovers is which he squeezes the flower over the wrong eyelids, causing further complications as to who loves whom; Oberon eventually resolves matters so that all four lovers are with the right partner, and lifts the spell from Titania, with whom he is reconciled.
From the outset the piece received good reviews. Both The Times and The Observer noted that the men's roles were particularly strong. In the latter, Alexander Bland called the piece "the first Ashton ballet to be slanted heavily in favour of the men". When the ballet was staged in New York in 2002, the critic Mary Cargill wrote of the Victorian setting:
