We've seen a lot of this lately: old white dude Bill Shakespeare's plays being seized upon by non-old, non-white, often non-male filmmakers and carried off to be staged anew in the former outposts of Empire. The last few months have offered up an excellent, cutthroat Titus Andronicus from India (The Hungry) and a rougher-edged Measure for Measure out of Pakistan (Rahm); with A Caribbean Dream, writer-director Shakirah Bourne transposes A Midsummer Night's Dream onto Barbadian shores. (In this, she follows in the footsteps of One Love, Don Letts' 2003 update of Romeo and Juliet to latter-day Jamaica.) This gives Bourne certain geographic advantages: the first shot of her adaptation is of a roseate sunset, and there isn't a scene thereafter that doesn't open out onto some lush forest or soothing, dentist's-surgery-poster horizon. Her handling of the text, alas, proves far less seductive.
The modernisation Bourne undertakes with co-writer/producer Melissa Simmonds - lines appropriated as Facebook updates, pierced nipples, a female Bottom - is bold but not unobjectionable, and there are flickers of visual imagination whenever the story retreats into the fairy kingdom, with its formation dancing and snug campfire feel. Yet the performers, a ragbag of locals and holidaying RADA graduates, tend to be plonked artlessly before the camera, their dutiful line readings overshadowed by occasional excursions to carnival - sequences in which everyone appears to be having much more fun - and in places even drowned out by the sound of waves breaking on the shore. It's a commendably pacy adaptation - all over and done with inside 80 minutes - but for long stretches Bourne actively doubles down on the tweeness of her source material. The whiff of suntanned am-dram is never more than a frame or two away.
A Caribbean Dream opens in selected cinemas from today.
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