Peter Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company had a profound effect on a whole generation of theatre artists and audience members. It is regarded as one of the most influential Shakespearean productions of the 20th century. Sally Jacobs’s white-box set was key to its success.

Brook’s original aim was to make the play’s magic believable by mixing actors with Chinese acrobats, having been inspired by the Peking Circus on its first visit to Europe. This proved unworkable, so Brook used an RSC cast (including Frances de la Tour, Alan Howard and Ben Kingsley), who began a period of intensive, unconventional rehearsal that included gymnastics, circus tricks, and singing and dancing.

Brook and Sally Jacobs developed the standard white-box set (widely used at Stratford at the time) into a fantastical gymnasium/circus space. Steel ladders ran from the ground to a gallery where the musicians were stationed and where the actors waited when they were ‘off-stage’, gazing down on the action, or providing sound effects and rough music. Trapezes were suspended from the ceiling and wire springs dangled down to form the Athenian wood in which the lovers and ‘mechanicals’ are ensnared. Puck walked on stilts, actors dangled from trapezes, and Titania’s bed became a giant feather suspended on wires. The actors wore loose clothes (kaftans and bell bottoms) in white, or bright, jewel-like colours that allowed them to contrast with, or blend into, the set.

Sally Jacobs re-made this model for the V&A to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the production, reusing some of the original model parts. The scene she created shows Puck (in luminous yellow) on stilts, Demetrius and Helena entangled in a wire thicket, and Oberon (in purple) on trapeze, while Titania rests on her feather bed attended by floating fairies.