Adaptations of Shakespeare’s work are nothing new, but to what extent theatre practitioners should be able to take liberties with Shakespeare’s original texts is hotly debated. Emma Rice’s 2016 modern-dress production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a raucous send-up of the beloved classic that took an irreverent attitude towards the original text. Rice, along with dramaturg Tanika Gupta added plain-English lines alongside the Elizabethan text, a controversial move among Shakespeare purists. Julie Taymor’s 2014 version of the same play did not alter the text in any way, but it did take a backseat to the visual elements of the show which included projections, use of a fly, and a striking stylistic cohesion. In this paper, I explore how both Taymor and Rice’s respective productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream operate within the postdramatic – that is, their respective choices to move beyond using Shakespeare’s original text as the central element of performance. Using Hans-Thies Lehmann’s framework, I will examine how these productions exemplify the “perpetual conflict between text and scene” (Lehmann 145) that infuse elements of the postdramatic into these productions.