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Back into the woods we go. Nicholas Hytner’s exhilarating, semi-immersive staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream first played at the Bridge Theatre in 2019, just before the pandemic sliced through all thoughts of communal storytelling. It returns as joyous and sprightly as ever, but its impish embrace of alternative loves and lifestyles feels more weighted than it did, as does its robust rejection of oppressive patriarchal power.
It opens with a nod to The Handmaid’s Tale — a dour chorus of men in dark suits and women in nun-like uniforms chanting solemn psalms — and closes with an ecstatic party, the whole theatre rocking to Beyoncé’s “Love on Top”. It’s endlessly playful, gently queered and often very funny.
But it’s the skill with which Hytner, designer Bunny Christie and movement director Arlene Phillips enfold the audience in the world of the play that brings home its more serious points about freedom and the transforming power of love. By wrapping the seating around a huge central pit where standing spectators are scooped up into the action, they make palpable the slide from cruel, cold Athens into the dreamlike, moonlit woods. Here the outer world of the forest and mysterious terrain of the subconscious become as one.
Young lovers shoot past you in various stages of distress and disarray; mischievous acrobatic fairies drop from the heights on silken threads like spiders; the sweetly funny mechanicals clamber around with camping stools and scripts or take selfies on some hapless audience member’s phone. Puck (an outstanding, superbly athletic David Moorst) springs from nowhere, dangles provocatively with the love-potion flower clutched between his toes, or disappears, eerily, into a hole in the ground.
And Hytner brings a Puckish twist of his own to Shakespeare’s original. He first starkly reminds us of what is at stake, with Susannah Fielding’s Hippolyta paraded, as Theseus’s bride-to-be, in a glass box, her Amazonian power safely contained. Fielding, gracious and dignified, radiates silent rage. But when she sees young Hermia (Nina Cassells) condemned for daring to follow her heart rather than her father’s wishes, she locks eyes with the girl and presses her hand to the glass. It’s a moment of mutiny, emboldening Hermia to take action and so bring down the glorious, disinhibiting freedom of the woods on characters and audience alike.
In this alternative world, Fielding and JJ Feild double as the squabbling fairy royals, Titania and Oberon. But Hytner’s innovation is to have Titania cast a bewitching spell on Oberon, rather than the other way round. In the woods, it is the woman who holds the power, and Oberon who is smitten with an ass. It picks up the themes of rebellion and transformation, weaving in both sexuality and class, and ensures that everyone is touched by their encounter with the woods.
The lovers (Cassells, Lily Simpkiss, Paul Adeyefa and Divesh Subaskaran) are touchingly earnest and painfully young, and the am-dram locals are delightfully precise and droll, presided over by Felicity Montagu’s flustered Quince. Emmanuel Akwafo is poignantly funny as the bemused, besotted Bottom. But he also takes his role in the ridiculous play at the end seriously — another deft touch in this exuberant celebration of the transforming joys of both love and theatre.
★★★★☆
To August 20, bridgetheatre.co.uk
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