For the third and final production of the 2010 Garsington Opera season — the last in the gardens of the 17th-century Oxfordshire manor house where the festival began in 1989 — we are offered a production whose startling design and trompe l’oeil effects could not contrast more sharply with the spartan simplicity of the early days.

We hardly need to be shown the Athenian wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when all its creaks, sighs and susurrations are so perfectly supplied in the music of Benjamin Britten, interpreted here under the baton of conductor Steuart Bedford who worked with the composer on its first recording.

So, taking their cue from the concern with sleep that characterises the opera (and, of course, the play on which Britten and co-librettist Peter Pears so faithfully based it, in a work of astonishing concision), director Daniel Slater and designer Francis O’Connor give us a forest largely composed of beds. Well, apart from what seems like the last long stretch of a helter-skelter ride, stage left, down which various characters — and most appropriately a ‘train’ of the talented young boys playing the Fairies — make entrances.

James Laing’s Oberon magically appears through a fissure in a mattress, before giving a first taste of the sinuous and exotic counter-tenor vocal line that so well suggests the other-worldliness of the character. Tytania (coloratura soprano Rebecca Bottone) romps with ass-headed Bottom (bass-baritone Neal Davies) in a bed-cum-bower whose multi-layered support recalls the story of the Princess and the Pea. The quartet of lovers into whose young lives careless Puck (Richard Durden in a spoken role) introduces such havoc all zonk out on dormitory-issue brass-framed jobs before the sleep of reason in which rationality is restored; the glorious quartet that marks their reconciliation is a musical highlight of the production, with soprano Katherine Manley (Helena), mezzo-soprano Anna Stéphany (Hermia), tenor Andrew Staples (Lysander) and baritone George von Bergen (Demetrius) weaving thrilling vocal magic.

When the production’s theme is not beds, it’s uniforms, as if Tracey Emin had inspired an episode of Dad’s Army. I confess to being puzzled about what the battle-stained divisions of Forces’ Fairies represent. But when the junior members of the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force move back into ‘civvies’ — the hilarities of the rustics’ Pyramus and Thisby play over — it is (do I need to say this?) into their jimmy-jams. Time for bed, Peter Pan-style, toys and gollies at the ready.

Lights out? On the contrary. A switch is pulled, and thousands upon thousands of bulbs we had not realised were there begin to twinkle on the set and way out across the parterre picking out the contours of the 96 Irish yews that point skyward from it. The audience is ecstatic as the singers take their bows, soon to be joined by the conductor. Steuart Bedford arrives, beaming, down the ‘helter-skelter’. How else?

Unforgettable memories are made of this.