If you love Shakespeare you will love the NT/Bridge Theatre 2019 production of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream being broadcast on Youtube for free for the rest of this week (June 28th).
If you do not love Shakespeare I think this is the best production to change your mind and heart. It is hilarious, open hearted, inventive and as clear as spring water.
I am sure that if he was alive today Shakespeare would have delighted in this production, just as he delighted the audiences at The Globe some 420 years ago.
Set in London's Bridge Theatre’s great cube, with staged seating all round the edges, and a central stage surrounded by a pit where a standing audience can cram the edges in touching distance of the players, just like The Globes’s standing groundlings.
The height of the theatre allows the gender-fluid fairies to use Cirque du Soleil acrobatics on silks suspended from the ceiling. David Moorst spent month mastering these skills to prepare for his Puck, allowing him to deliver his lines perfectly (and impishly) while cavorting in the air.
Shakespeare would have loved to use female actors, and Gwendoline Christie, Brienne of Tarthfrom Game of Thrones, plays Titania, Queen of the Fairies and also Hippolyte, Prince Theseus’s captured Amazonian bride-to-be, with wit, warmth and steel.
But Shakespeare also enjoyed gender confusion. Not only did men play all his female parts, but male characters ‘passed’ as women and vice versa. Men fell in love with men posing as women, and vice versa. Oliver Chris, who plays the King of the Fairies Oberon and Theseus here, was also in the National Theatre’s Twelfth Night a couple of years ago, when Tamsin Gregg was Malvolia, Lady Olivia’s female steward, rather than a male Malvolio.
In this Dream Nicolas Hytner has swapped some lines to make Titania tell Puck to sprinkle magic pollen into Oberon’s eyes, rather than vice versa, so Oberon falls in love with the donkey-eared Bottom. Oberon is bewitched, Bottom is surprised, but rather ‘hey, why not? ‘ as the two men cavort to Love on Top by Beyoncé, and the groundlings hold hands, shaking their hips with the other actors. Shakespeare would surely have loved that.
Many of the cast engage directly with the audience, ad libbing with them. Puck, especially and appropriately, taking the most liberties. At one point Bottom borrows a phone and takes a group selfie of the Crude Mechanicals. Some purists may not approve, but surely Shakespeare would have used whatever means he had to entertain his audience, and among his actors there were Comedy Superstars who would surely have enjoyed banter with their fans.
The whole cast (and crew) are superb. Alongside Christie, Chris and Moorst we have Hammed Animashaun as the gentle giant Bottom, shy at times, properly over the top as Pyramus in the play-within-a-play, Felicity Montagu as the gender-changed Quince and the rest of the Crude Mechanicals, the four young actors playing the Athenian lovers lost in the woods and in their similarly confused love lives, and the sinuous and sensuous fairies.
As well as Beyonce’s Love On Top, they use Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Je t’aime moi non plus, I Can See Cleary Now by Johnny Nash, Dizzee Rascal’s Bonkers and Florence + The Machine’s Florence’s Only If For A Night, all providing a highly intelligent commentary on the play.
Nicolas Hytner wanted this to be “ridiculous and glorious”, and so it is. The audience obviously loved it, and so – I am sure – would the antic spirit of Shakespeare. If you think Shakespeare is difficult, boring or old fashioned, please give it a try. Money back if not delighted.
