'I will lead them up and down'

About three weeks ago, while I was mooching in this square – one of Oxford’s more interesting places for taking photos – I spotted this guy playing his guitar to himself. I was intrigued. He looked neither like a busker nor like some of the homeless people who sit around here. I took a whole series of pictures from a discreet distance and caught a small group of people come up to him and get very involved in conversation unusually quickly. Then they left. Some sort of  deal? Perhaps? But it didn’t look quite like that.
 
I forgot about him until this afternoon when I took S, who was on the boat with us, to see an itinerant production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. (If you’re going to see it, stop reading here.)
 
Twelve of us assembled where we’d been told and were handed a briefcase with chrysanthemum buttonholes and instructions about where to go next. At the next stop we watched a fuzzy video of part of Midsummer Night’s Dream before being told to leave the building quickly by the back door. Soon we were intercepted by Demetrius asking us to hide him and sure enough, along came Helena declaring her passion. Demetrius escaped and we bumped into Flute who showed us how to protect ourselves from fairies. We were directed by different characters in and out of a whole series of buildings (including the workplace that made me redundant a year ago, with my photo still on the wall) where we experienced different parts of the play. At one point we came across a very distressed Hermia who asked to borrow a mobile phone to call Helena. After we'd overheard the conversation and Hermia had made a rapid escape on a bike, our next clue came as a text message. Every now and then we bumped into other groups seeing segments of the play in a different order and, as instructed, we all called out to each other, ‘See you at the wedding’. We did all get to the wedding, suitably in a church.
 
And this guy? Puck, if you haven’t already guessed.