Evening Standard, 10 Jul 1992
'Imagine the jolting shock. Instead of the usual palace, the familiar midsummer wood, fresh with fairies, where lovers come to grief by moonlight, the stage for this production is a black-walled no man's land.
Centre stage there lies a shallow pool of muddy water in the midst of which stands a bare brass bedstead. The pool is surrounded by mud and more mud. Shakespeare's old dream, as we have come to know it has vanished entirely. What is going on? A director's box of cheap tricks? Mere midsummer madness? Not at all. I have come away bewitched.'

Financial Times 11 Jul 1992
''There is a great deal of athleticism, as one would expect from Lepage. In the Dream the great physical feats come from Angela Laurier's Puck. She does a circus-like aerial spinning act while putting a girdle round the earth in 40 minutes and spends much of her time upside down. Instead of giving Bottom an ass's head, she twines her legs round his neck with her feet sticking out looking like ass's ears - a pose which is only abandoned when Titania gets round to ravishing him.'

Times, 11 Jul 1992
'it is the music, the light, the overall look and feel that matter. Why not? When weird and wonderful things are done with bedframes, chairs and other simple props; when Puck swings feverishly round and round on a rope above the distraught lovers; when Titania snoozes in her hanging cocoon, or when sinister shadows appear and fragment on the vast black mirror at the back - well, who would not submit? There is no more brilliantly imaginative production in town.

Guardian, 11 Jul 1992
'The most perverse, leaden, humourless and vilely spoken production of this magical play I have ever seen'.

Daily Telegraph, 13 Jul 1992
'There has never been A Midsummer Night's Dream like Robert Lepage's Dream at the National Theatre. It is weird, wonderful and occasionally frustrating, like one of those nightmares when you know you are dreaming but still can't force yourself to wake up.... If you surrender to Lepage's vision, it is a staging of real wonder. Mysterious and hypnotic, with an almost continuous score of haunting gamelan music, the production digs beneath the play's comic surface to expose all its disturbing sexuality. Far from diminishing the magic of The Dream, Lepage has enriched it.'

Time Out 15 Jul 1992
'[Lepage] has quite rightly connected the piece's sexy, Freudian undercurrents, giving us a dreamscape composed mainly of sensual rather than shivery mud and water, the barest of props, the copious use of shadow, and exotic musical effects which punctuate the almost perpetual, primordial gloom. The result is a swirl of imagistic and cultural reference-points, everything from 'The Arabian Nights' and commedia dell'arte to yoga, vaudeville and the circus. It can be in turns breathtaking, ponderous, revelatory, amusing and downright boring.'

International Herald Tribune 12 Aug 1992
'This is the "Dream" turned nightmare, except that just when you have decided on Lepage's dark purpose he conjures up an image of stunning beauty, such as the Ganges, and you are left to consider yet again the true purpose of an exotic director's benefit night. Shakespeare two, Lepage five is about the final score.'