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There'll be more updates from me over the coming weeks, including screencaps from Episodes 3 and 4 of Boy Meets Girl, screencaps from the films Redemption Road and The Young Victoria, and some new multimedia items as well.

Hope you enjoy the screencaps.

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I've also added photos from the after party. I've updated the performance galleries for The Priory, A Woman of No Importance, Anna in the Tropics and The Taming of the Shrew.

In addition to this, I've added some photos from the Discover Wilton's Fundraising Gala in December 2007. Thank you very much to Philippa for those.

Finally, I've added a further review of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from The Times again, but a different reviewer.

I'll be back with more updates during the week.

I know listening to someone's commuting woes is about as interesting as listening to their dreams, but the point is, I was in a really foul temper to start with. I emerged nearly three hours later with a fixed and goofy smile on my face, undismayed even by the prospect of my return journey. A Midsummer Night's Dream may, indeed, be "the silliest stuff that ever I heard", as Shakespeare cheerfully admits via Hippolyta in a helpful meta-commentary. But in this superlative new Peter Hall production, as feelgood shows go, this 400-year-old favourite is still as good as any.

Judi Dench as Titania may be too old — she first played the role some years before I was born — but what a lot she brings to it. She is every inch a queen here, the Queen of the Fairies but also the Virgin Queen of England, with richly embroidered Elizabethan dress, white ruff, and pearls sparkling in her dyed carroty hair.

The scene in which she falls for a translated Bottom, now adorned with an ass's head, is as comical as ever, yet you're also convinced Titania really is in the throes of passionate love. The line, "O, how I love thee, how I dote on thee!", spoken with such husky and tremulous longing, and with that permanent crack in her voice, is deeply touching — even in this most farcical of situations. When they awake, you're in no doubt how they have spent the night. One of Shakespeare's more scandalous jokes, like the mythical Pasiphae, the clear implication here is that Titania's affections have, er, crossed the species barrier.

Recent productions by Peter Hall have sometimes felt like the work of a master, but one whose best is behind him. This Dream is a tremendously energetic septuagenarian rebuttal of such impertinent thoughts, with some brilliant additions. Bottom's fluffed lines about the lion having deflowered his beloved (he means "devoured" — another bestiality joke) is made funnier still here with Peter Quince as an irascible prompt. "Devoured!"

What with the fairies' diabolical mischief-making, and the shambolic am-dram of the rude mechanicals, it's not unusual in many productions for the central story of the four lovers to take second or even third place, and feel like an interruption of the fun. Not here, thanks to some excellent acting from this strong quartet, thoroughly engaging with all their youthful impassioned energy. Tam Williams makes a boyish and impatient Lysander and Rachael Stirling is poignant and credible as poor plain Helena, the drama driven by Shakespeare's customary, richly humane sense that we are never so ludicrous, nor so lovable, as when we are in love, and in thrall to the random arrows of the "waggish boy".

Hall writes interestingly in an introduction of how the play is essentially "about marriage, the necessity of it, and how we can learn to be married". And there is another fine touch when Bottom the ass starts to laugh, and it comes out as a harsh bray. His besotted Titania joins in the laughter — again in a harsh, companionable bray, just as married couples do, growing together in habits, tastes, tics, everything.

But Hall also has the lovers portraying love as, emphatically, a compound of the physical as well as the spiritual, visibly panting as they chase after each other, and not just because they're out of breath. Lysander, suddenly in thrall to Helena thanks to Puck's potion, actually starts tearing his clothes off as soon as he sets eyes on her. Indeed, the whole play here seems to be richly mocking Helena's own lofty declaration in Act One, that "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind". On the contrary, love is very much rooted in the earthier emotions, and if it isn't, it won't work out.

As for the rude mechanicals, they're a delight. The last scene, when they finally stage their atrocious play of Pyramus and Thisbe, is genuinely, riotously funny. Oliver Chris shows us as pleasing a Bottom as you'll see this side of Copacabana beach, and Leon Williams is also excellent as Flute playing Thisbe. The whole troupe speak with Birmingham, or possibly Black Country, accents. I don't know whether this is a vague reference to Shakespeare's Warwickshire, but it is somehow funnier still to hear Bottom as a Brum Bum.

Elizabeth Bury is responsible for both set and costume, and achieves great things with the latter, at least. The hard, mirrored court of Athens looks a bit like an East German engineering college, which isn't very inspiring, even when you add shadowy trees and some twinkly stars. But the costumes are terrific, from Dame Judi's bejewelled and regal splendour to Bottom's daft galligaskins. As silly stuff goes, this Midsummer Night's Dream still casts its moonlit magic.

A quick update from me this evening, as I've just added all of the recent reviews for A Midsummer Night's Dream to the website.

I've also added a fantastic Evening Standard interview with Rachael, which you can read here: Rachael Stirling is a rising stage star — and she's in love with her ass (this refers to her boyfriend, Oliver Chris, who plays Bottom).

In the interview, Rachael mentions that she writes restaurant reviews for Diplomat magazine, and I have added those to the site as well. I recommend that you read them as they're very funny and well-written.

• Le Café Anglais: Rachael Stirling reviews Le Café Anglais
• Truly Belle Amies: Rachael Stirling reviews Bellamy's
• Two Times Tom: Rachael Stirling reviews Tom Aikens and Tom's Kitchen

Finally, here are all of the reviews of the play that I could find. Some brilliant praise for Rachael in these; in fact in many cases, she is singled out as being the star of the show. I haven't seen a single bad word about her performance in any of them. Fantastic!

• The Times
• The Guardian
• The Stage
• The Telegraph
• Financial Times
• musicOMH
• TheaterMania
• Evening Standard
• Variety
• Curtain Up London
• Daily Mail
• What's On Stage
• The Independent

Who else has been to see the play or is planning to go?

Incredibly, though, Dame Judi is back in the same role, once more under the supervision of Sir Peter — both having been to Buckingham Palace in the interim.

Hall's big idea in casting Dench as the Queen of the Fairies was to set her as a surrogate of Queen Elizabeth I. Yet in all honesty there is no great reason for this.

It is true Elizabeth was called the Fairy Queen, but little can disguise the fact that Dame Judi is doing her bit to boost a struggling, unsubsidised theatre. To that extent, at least, it is job done; the show is sold out for the rest of its run.

It is, moreover, a solid production, distinguished by the clarity of its diction. The rhythms and rhymes of the gorgeous poetry peal out with bell-like clarity — perhaps in deference to the director's hearing.

However, Sir Peter has always had a good ear for the Bard and this is also a pleasantly nimble, period performance, rattling through the play on a minimal, glossy black set that echoes with subtle sounds of the forest.

Meanwhile, Dame Judi weaves her own svelte magic, but is not much taxed by her role. Her main job is to fall in love with a donkey — after coming under a mischievous spell contrived by the jealous Fairy King, Oberon.

She is, however, utterly convincing in her amorousness as she tenderly strokes her beloved's long, hairy ears and kisses his damp, dilated nostrils.

Opposite her Charles Edwards makes an amusingly outre fairy king. Equipped with extra-large cape and bouffant hairdo, he has the look of a Doctor Who villain from the Seventies.

The donkey, who starts out as one of the play's 'rude mechanicals', is affably played by Oliver Chris as an excitable Brummie.

The young lovers who charge about the stage in their own lovestruck delirium add further zip and energy, with Rachael Stirling making one of life's eternal victims as Helena.

Otherwise, calling in James Bond's some-time boss to do this play is, you might say, a case of Dial M For Kingston.

I do not mean to spend the entire interview with Rachael Stirling, the Olivier-nominated star of The Royal Court's The Priory and daughter of Dame Diana Rigg, making jokes about her Bottom. But it becomes unavoidable.

She started it, gushing about the highlight of the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream she is starring in, at The Rose Theatre, Kingston.

Not Dame Judi Dench, but Bottom. "Ours is this gangly, young, bombastic Bottom. People run up to him afterwards and say, You're the best Bottom I've ever seen'." She speaks at length about the "young comic actor" playing Bottom — Oliver Chris (Boyce from Green Room) — before revealing much later in the conversation that he is in fact her live-in boyfriend of three years. She calls him "my boy". No wonder she likes Bottom so much.

Stirling, 32, plays Helena in the Rose's production. London's newest theatre, the Rose is also one of the most cash-strapped, relying almost exclusively on box office returns. So the theatre could really do with having the best Bottom ever, plus Dame Judi as Titania — or "Jude" as Stirling calls her — topping the bill.

When we meet at the theatre, Stirling is dressed like someone who knows she's beautiful — which is to say, with very little care — in an old T-shirt, miniskirt, mismatched necklaces. She wears no make-up, her hair is unbrushed. She is endearingly luvvie-ish as she describes how she plays Helena: "You're in this heightened emotional state from the beginning of the play. It's like when you first have your heart broken. Helena is like an open scab — she is trying to form a crust and it doesn't quite work."

It's a marked difference from her last theatre role as bitchy Rebecca (described by one reviewer as "magnificently odious") in The Priory at The Royal Court, for which she has just been nominated for an Olivier as best actress in a supporting role [the awards will take place on 21 March]. She describes how she found out about the nomination: "I had my head down the lavatory all morning with some bug, then when I was on the train to work the director called me and said, Have you ever been nominated for anything before?' I found myself half being sick and half crying."

Stirling comes from the old school of British posh where it's fine to swear all the time. "You lucky f**ker," she shouts at me, when she finds out I had a short journey to Kingston. (She has to travel from north London.)

Later, she describes how tired she is: "I've been waking up with puffy pissholes in the snow for eyes." But with a voice and a face like hers, you can get away with anything: her plummy, husky tones make Mariella Frostrup sound like Janet Street-Porter. You can imagine her having a laugh with "Jude". "Oh, she is a joy," she gushes. (Dame Judi Dench first played Titania in 1962 with Sir Peter Hall directing: this is their reprise. Hall is the director of the Rose.) "She is just such fun. And she wants to play all the time. Much like other people in that position, they want to hang out and not be treated deferentially. She has a modesty and a humility.

I hear she gets rather naughty once a play has opened," Stirling adds, "and I am an easy person to make laugh so I think I will be keeping away from her."

Stirling is the only daughter of Dame Diana Rigg — "Ma" — and Archie Stirling, a businessman and theatre producer. They split up when Rachael was in her early teens. As it was, she grew up with little awareness of her mother's career. "Ma kept work and home separate. When I started out people thought I had grown up on set but I absolutely hadn't." She went to university (Edinburgh) to study art history instead of going to drama school. "I've been learning on the job since then." She is uncomfortable talking about her mother, though: "Not to harp on too much about Ma, but it's a misconception that she is formidable. She calls herself a patsy." (She means a pushover.) But it's obvious that acting is in the blood. "It engages my heart, my brain — being able to engage passion and intelligence is a great privilege. And the element of play allows you to be childish, to laugh a lot and to find yourself with people who are equally playful."

She finds the unpredictable nature of the job stressful, though. "I do panic when I'm out of work and there have been long periods of that. And I'm not a good auditionee. I talk myself out of jobs in front of the director and suggest other people who would be better. You do get down and depressed but you just have to keep the faith. That's where my degree comes in handy. I always think, I know I'm not stupid and if all this finishes tomorrow I can do something else'."

It helps that she has other roles. She presents Loose Ends on Radio 4 occasionally and writes a restaurant column for the Diplomat magazine. (Recent favourites include Nobu and Café Anglais at Whiteleys.) But acting — whether theatre, TV or film — is her real focus. Later this year she stars in action adventure film Centurion — "a small but delicious part" — alongside Michael Fassbender and Dominic West.

She is still best-known, though, for her role as Nan in Tipping the Velvet — "certainly among the lesbian community. God, they remember it and they're a very faithful following." The 2002 role involved escaping an attempted rape and navigating Victorian sex toys. She was recognised in the street constantly for months afterwards — "luckily it wasn't at a time when everyone had cameras on their mobiles" — and was even photographed rowing in the street with her then-boyfriend (not Bottom), an ugly picture which surfaced in the press. Now she avoids parties and red carpet events: "I borrowed a designer dress to go to something once and ending up sitting in the loo thinking, What have I done?' It felt like putting on a character. Never again. All the tarting-up is just something I'm not good at."

This is mostly, she says, because she is "a boring homebody". "My boyfriend likes pub quizzes. I like Scrabble, backgammon, telly and open fires. I occasionally go on a girls' night out but mostly I stay at home watching box sets like The West Wing, True Blood and The Wire." She relishes her relative anonymity because she knows it could change at any moment with the right TV role. "I've just been working with Rupert Penry-Jones in The Priory and he is a business now, after Spooks. I don't know if I envy that. I quite like the haphazardness of my life." Last year she went to Japan and to Costa Rica for a month with Bottom, I mean Oliver, just because she could. "I don't see how you can bring interesting things to acting if you are sitting in a Winnebago reading scripts."

Stirling's tendency to speak her mind makes her very likeable. "I really resent how expensive everything is in London," she says, going off on a tirade which is somehow reminiscent of her mother. "I'm not a moaner by the way — we have a tax on moaning here at the theatre. Anyone who moans has to buy burgers. But if you want to make a cultural contribution to life in London, it demands constant motivation, passion and commitment." Which is not easy on actors' salaries. Her travel costs, for example, from central London to Kingston for the play's six-week run add up to a week's pay.

Still, she doesn't see herself as political although her passionate ranting suggests otherwise. "I shut up and vote. To not vote is something I couldn't entertain. The idea of women my age who don't vote… I'm afraid I disapprove of that." She worries about her generation, saddled with a mountain of student debt and now not able to find jobs in the recession. "I was at university in the last year tuition fees were paid for you. I went to a protest against tuition fees and when I got there, there were about 40 people. We have become a real me' culture where we look after ourselves and don't look after anybody else. Somebody has got to encourage my generation to protest."

Forget protest, I suggest, half-joking, what about getting on and having a family, if she has been with Oliver for three years? She turns serious. Pregnancy is difficult because acting work is so physical and visual, she says. "There is a pressure on women. For an actress it's a frightening prospect. And financially… Well, basically, you stop earning. But I do definitely want children." Yes, make the most of your Bottom, I urge, embarrassing even myself. She laughs politely, if wearily. "We have had a lot of Bottom jokes lately." She runs through some pictures on her mobile phone which include "Jude" and her boyfriend embracing on stage with him wearing the enormous donkey head. It is indeed the cutest Bottom I've ever seen. OK, I'll get my coat now.

So how does it seem? Vocally Dench is perfect, her lovely, lovely voice which has a richness and depth, a fragility and beauty, still astounds us. The words when she first spies Bottom, a a very hairy but rather cuddly donkey (think plush toy), (Oliver Chris) "What angel wakes me from my flowery bed," almost earned a round of applause were it not for the deference in which we hold Shakespeare's verse.

Dench has a magnificent stage presence but somehow her Oberon (Charles Edwards) is a lot less magnificent than her favourites, Robert Devereux the Earl of Essex, or Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester, would have been. Of course that is where the parallel has to stop and Sir Peter Hall does not dramatically develop the theme. There is no way Queen Elizabeth I would have allowed Oberon to win, remember the Earl of Essex was executed for his failures in Ireland and she signed his death warrant. Interesting that the lesser meaning nowadays of dotage, that of foolish infatuation has become synonymous with foolish old age, so when Oberon regrets his spell, "Her dotage now I do begin to pity" we smile.

For those of us who like history, there is another harking back to the cast of the past: in the 1968 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream where Dench played Titania, Diana Rigg was Helena to Helen Mirren's Hermia. In 2010 Rachael Stirling, who is a tall and very good actress like her mother Diana Rigg, plays Helena. Shame Helen Mirren has no daughter! But wouldn't that have been fun, three Dames of the British Empire — Dench, Rigg and Mirren — playing Titania, Helena and Hermia in a senior production? Rachael Stirling is magnificent as the spaniel, pleading and desperate and as the outraged maypole. You can hear her mother's beautiful intonation which made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Bottom is played with great enthusiasm by Rachael Stirling's real life boyfriend Oliver Chris. This homespun mechanical with the Birmingham Midlands accent is the life and soul of the party, like the star of an amateur dramatic company and his scenes with Titania are very good fun, actually making Bottom and Titania a better couple than Oberon and Titania! As Titania snuggles up to the donkey she looks very comfortable and cosy as if in a fur rug. Even in the scenes with Thisbe (Leon Williams as Francis Flute) there is no limit to Bottom's ardour in his passionate on the mouth kissing which so disconcerts the other man!

The other parts tend to be overshadowed by these three actors and I found the hyper-manic Puck (Reece Ritchie) interpretation bizarre but it must have been the director's choice. Hall's production will be remembered for its star not for itself or the ensemble acting although the Pyramus and Thisbe play is great fun. Theseus (Julian Wadham) and Hippolyta (Susan Salmon) are a country squire and his country wife, not allowed to be regal of course!

The set is very plain with silhouetted branches casting shadows, fairy lights as stars and a black shiny floor. The courtiers and the fairies are in black and white Tudor clothes like the Elizabethan needlepoint called "blackwork" (introduced to England by Elizabeth I's father's first wife Catherine of Aragon) and the mechanicals wear hessian smocks with real smocking stitches. On opening night, I heard two critics having a heated discussion as to whether the donkey was more like a pony than a donkey!

Playing so close to Valentine's Day with all those declarations of undying love is this satirical play about infatuation and the excesses and inconstancy of romantic love with an interesting twist in an older woman's convincing portrayal of a fairy queen.

If Shakespeare's setting is mythical Greece, Hall's staging is handsomely Elizabethan — black and silver costumes for the fairies, creamy whites for the lovers and rust shades for the nobles to match Queen Elizabeth's red wig. Indeed, Dench makes her first entrance as Gloriana, accepting a playbill before waving the actors to begin.

As the English queen she then returns to portray Titania, a part she first played for Hall at Stratford in 1962. Is she now too mature to be a lovelorn, passionate fairy? Happily, the warmth of her stage personality and a light, youthful voice render this question irrelevant.

Another 'queen' also illuminates the evening. Rachael Stirling in terrific form plays Helena as a drama queen, starting with her heartbreaking "How happy…", the verse aria that ends the first scene, here delivered with stunning clarity, lit by a single spotlight, an achievement that confirms her status as a star actress.

After the interval and backed by a woodland setting of spooky skeletal trees, she also shares the bruising, knockabout comedy of the lovers' quartet with terrific comic attack from Annabel Scholey as Hermia, Tam Williams' Lysander and Ben Mansfield as Demetrius.

Charles Edwards makes a handsome Oberon with good stage presence, but his performance is impudently upstaged by Reece Ritchie, a scene-stealing Puck, who plays his Robin Goodfellow with the melodramatic energy of a latter-day Edmund Kean.

And at the risk of citing another parallel, Oliver Chris, strongly cast as Bottom, seems to have modelled his hilariously funny Pyramus on the declamatory style of Henry Irving, a witty combination of tragedian with glorious tongue in cheek drollery.

Dench plays the queen of the forest as an aging Queen Elizabeth I, stiff and regal in her ruff and pearl-studded bodice, and sporting a wig of tight tangerine curls. She is severe to begin with, rather similar in manner and bearing to her Oscar-winning portrayal of Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. But when Oberon streaks the potent sap across her sleeping eyes, she wakes, not exactly wild with desire, but just a little love-drunk and silly, nuzzling and cuddling up to her Bottom like a child would a teddy bear. Dench is warm and glittering, but the intriguing idea of the monarch's fallible side being exposed is only ever tentatively explored.

Indeed, the production is solidly — and at times almost ploddingly — conventional in its approach. While the comic scenes are played broadly, they are performed with much energy and sound timing, particularly by Oliver Chris as Bottom, who manages to convey much even when wearing an elaborate ass's head, complete with waggling ears. The Mechanicals attend to their play-within-a-play with, if not quite gusto, than something close to it.

The rest of the cast is more of a mixed bag. Rachael Stirling is particularly strong as Helena. Her sense of hurt and bafflement is palpable and her husky-voiced insistence on her ugliness has a real rawness and self-loathing to it. Tam Williams and Ben Mansfield, on the other hand, are rather interchangeable as Lysander and Demetrius. Reece Ritchie makes a strangely manic and off-putting Puck, more irritating than impish.

Elizabeth Bury's pared down design makes full use of the Rose's layout, which mirrors that of an Elizabethan theater, turning the pillars into shadowy tree trunks. However, this minimalist approach does little to evoke the necessary sense of magic and wonder. In fact magic is a quality in strangely short supply throughout, despite Dench's endearing turn.

The action is set in Athens, but steeped in the hues of Elizabethan England. Dench's Titania corresponds to the mythic Virgin Queen — red-haired, imperious, and bespangled with symbolic jewels, vividly recalling her turn in Shakespeare In Love.

Consequently, as the fairies practise their ethereal mischief, there's more than a hint of political intrigue. The play depicts the agonies of youthful devotion, and its imagery contains elements of romance, farce and the surreal, yet here there's also a fresh concern with Elizabeth's self-fashioning as a "faerie queene".

Elizabeth Bury's design conveys this ingeniously. The stage is mostly bare, but polished to a gleam, resembling an antique mirror, and around it are cutouts that import the crowding shadows of the forest — and of history. This is pastoral with more than a touch of Tim Burton about it, and the palette is initially sickly, moving towards sepia tones and then a silvery luminosity as discord gives way to harmony. These visual effects are deftly calculated. This, after all, is a work deeply concerned with ways of seeing and styles of loving. "Doting" is one of the play's keywords; another is "eye". Infatuation, Shakespeare suggests, is an ocular infection.

The best of the performances evoke this idea of desire as a strange ailment. Dench is both regal and lyrical, communicating an affecting musicality; an exit becomes the sort of glimmering farewell you'd find in a John Donne poem. Rachael Stirling is excellent, too, as the "painted maypole" Helena — achy and pining, but also saucy.

The men, it's fair to say, are not as strong as the women. The relationships are underdefined, and there's little in the way of midsummer sexual swelter. Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, are supposed to be celebrating their nuptials, but convey all the ardour of a couple trying to choose a new shower curtain at Homebase.

However, crucially, the "rude mechanicals" are a delight — a troupe of am-dramming ninnies who sound as though they're from the Black Country (perhaps a cleverly submerged joke about Elizabeth's suitor Lord Robert Dudley). They start well and get better, with Oliver Chris especially satisfying as Bottom, the bungling weaver.

In the end it's the comedy that speaks loudest in this enjoyably fluent interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yet beneath the absurdities and physical frolics, it has a wintry quality that's genuinely surprising.