During the closing scene of Brattle Theatre's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" three centaurs marched in with candelabras of Roman candles. Amid the fireworks, Puck told the audience to think it "had but slumber'd here," bade it good night, and sunk through the stage.

It was a dazzling close to a very dazzling production of the Shakespeare masque. The Brattle players handled the verbal part of the script to almost anybody's satisfaction but it was their imaginative staging which really captured the opening night audience and which will probably make the play a great success.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" takes place in three worlds: the Court world of Athens; the befuddled world of some Athenians who are part mechanics, part actors; and the world of the fairies.

The staging magic of this production began with the world of the mechanics. Rarely have I watched a more fetching crew of loonies than the five who rolled Bottom (played by Fred Gwynne) onstage. Gwynne squeezed every laugh out of the lines Shakespeare gave him and added a few of his own. He and his screwball cohorts used tricks of makeup, mugging, double taking, and simple grouping on stage for comic effect that would make the Marx brothers jealous. They were quite free of restraint and that was probably all for the good.

Almost as free from restraint were the fairy world scenes. Directors Albert Marre and Richard Baldridge wisely elected to let these sequences be almost sheer pageantry, a reasonable enough decision since Shakespeare probably never wrote "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a stage play anyway but merely as an afternoon's entertainment for a court wedding. The Brattle's fairy world possesses among other things coaches of trees on which the King and Queen of the fairies make their entrance. These coaches are drawn by handsomely costumed centaurs who do some brief dances to an original score by Ellen Bower.

Robert Fletcher designed the costumes and if prizes are available for this sort of work, he deserves one. They are magnificent. Probably the most imaginative number is one worn by Jan Farrand, the Fairy Queen, who enters with an enormous train. This train she later converts into her home for the night, much as a spider who spins her web.

The directors cast neither a girl, a child, nor Mickey Rooney as Puck. Instead, they gave Bryant Haliday the part and he does an admirably impish job of it.

Apparently the Brattle people cleared the whole rear of their stage for this show because the set has unusual depth. The size of the stage is enlarged still more by clever use of black drapes which give the stage an air of infinity that "A Midsummer Night's Dream" should have.

The scenes at Court, while by no means bad, were the least engaging. John Kerr, who recently played Billy Budd, unfortunately hasn't yet unlearned any of the motions and facial expressions he learned for that play. Hermia was supposed to have two men chasing her but she wouldn't have had me interested for a minute.