Daring Dream still casts a spell
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bridge Theatre via NT at Home, YouTube) Verdict: A very naughty dream
The Grinning Man (Bristol Old Vic, bristololdvic.org.uk) Verdict: Gothic musical out of season
Rush (BBC iPlayer) Verdict: Dreary navel-gazer
DO ShakeSpeare purists still exist? If so, they’d better look away now. Nicholas hytner’s promenade production of Shakespeare’s comedy, starring Gwendoline Christie and Oliver Chris, is a nicely naughty piece of work, but it does take some serious liberties.
It starts off by evoking the puritan world of Margaret atwood’s The handmaid’s Tale, with women dressed like nuns and men dressed like funeral directors. This serves to heighten the difference between this and the rest of the frolicsome play, in which four young lovers escape to the forest — only to get caught up in a bitter feud between the king and Queen of the Fairies.
Minor naughtiness comes in the form of a good deal of ad-libbing, including when one actor borrows a phone from a spectator (‘Unlock your mobile, I beseech you!’).
But the major meddling is Sir Nicholas’s. he swaps the roles of the Fairy king and Queen, so that we have Titania (Christie) getting one over on Oberon (Chris) by making him fall in love with a donkey.
Full marks for political correctness. But while Game Of Thrones star Christie is given more power, it also means that she has less fun.
The inimitable Chris (the original posh boy in One Man, Two Guvnors) bags the better part, getting some good same-sex love action with hammed animashaun as Bottom the weaver, after Bottom is ‘translated’ into a donkey. The pair even get to share a bubble bath while being serenaded by a soul diva.
The show really starts to cook in the second half, but until then the arena staging in the middle of the audience, with fairies hanging from trapezes, proves less enchanting on TV than it did in real life last year.
even so, animashaun is the best
Bottom I’ve ever seen. he takes eager, childlike delight in playing a character whose dreams have all come true at once. Make a date with him at least.
I FIrST saw The Grinning Man in the depths of winter in 2016. Now, in this scorching summer of 2020, the gothic musical based on Victor hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs feels oddly out of season.
It’s a sprawling yarn about a disfigured boy in a war- torn kingdom who works in a freak show and longs to know the truth about his past.
Director Tom Morris turns the story into a lewdly theatrical, Black-adderish romp, with the odd corpse singing from a gibbet.
There are hints of The phantom Of The Opera and The elephant Man, and it’s driven by a Beauty and The Beast romance between our mutilated hero ( Louis Maskell) and his blind beloved (audrey Brisson). The music is a murky, jagged and turbulent voyage in itself.
But while the dark and cavernous staging made sense in winter, it feels weirdly morose in midsummer.
even so, it does feature one of my favourite actors, Julian Bleach, as an evil, pasty-faced court jester, with dark shadows around his eyes. Cackling in despair, he seems to embody how many of us have come to feel lately.
DON’T worry if you can’t catch rupert everett in a Zoom reading of Willi richards’s play rush to mark LGBT pride Month.
In the show, which is part of BBC iplayer’s Culture In Quarantine series, everett plays a rueful fiftysomething trying to hang on to his toyboy lover, whom he fears he is losing to another youth from the dating app Grindr.
With a good deal of navel-gazing about inter- generational gay sexual politics, the dialogue is flip and glib, and the plot is underpowered.
There are a few ‘ ooh- er Vicar!’ moments, with some explicit sex talk, and I did enjoy watching the grizzled everett smoke a joint in front of his baronial fireplace.
But the other two characters are simply stooges, forced to cue up dreary ruminations.