Thrones star’s Midsummer Night is a dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bridge Theatre, London SE1
Gwendoline Christie, the Game of Thrones actress, plays the captured Amazonian queen Hippolyta in Nicholas Hytner’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre, London. The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish gives the play five stars
In its mix of serious insight and frisky innovation, by-the-book straightness and surprise queerness, it’s a show for (almost) all ages
Let us offer a shiver of sympathy for the Globe and the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. Not only does the washout summer seem expressly designed to put al-fresco Shakespeare on a par with a plunge in the North Sea, but even if the sun does re-emerge a cloud hangs over their hopes of winning this season’s battle of the Dreams.
First of the three, at the mercifully weatherproof Bridge, Nicholas Hytner’s revival – harnessing the immersive and technical potential of his new box of tricks and getting the zestful best from a lithe and energetic ensemble (stage-management included) – exceeds even the high expectations set by his promenade
Julius Caesar last year.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this is the most accomplished Shakespeare production of his I’ve ever encountered. True, I took the standing option (auditorium seats are available), so my pulse quickened partly by dint of being caught up in
the riotous mêlée. But in its mixture of serious insight and frisky innovation, by-the-book straightness and surprise queerness, it’s not just a show for (almost) all ages but one that deserves to be talked about for years to come.
For those willing to join the throng, Julius Caesar was in-your-face; this time, it’s over your head too. Lightly clad, glittery-faced fairies perform acrobatic feats, hanging off swings fashioned from sheets; the aerial stunts invite comparison with Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 circus influenced production. This feels purpose-built for today, though.
A 360-degree approach has been taken to the story’s “dream-world” scenario. The mirth-free, punitive nature of patriarchal Athens is accentuated. The captured Amazonian queen Hippolyta (an arrestingly pale and interesting Gwendoline Christie) is confined inside a glass installation, looking, in her puritanical garb, like an escapee turned exhibit from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Her imminent marriage to Oliver Chris’s terse Theseus promises incarceration, too. She leans forward in silent kinship with Isis Hainsworth’s unhappy Hermia – brutally prohibited from marrying her true love Lysander. Is what follows a projection of her subconscious impulses, a casting of spells? Bunny Christie’s set thrusts up iron-beds from which the four lovers sneak off, but which then help conjure the misty nocturnal woods through which they pantingly clamber.
The agent of supernatural mischief and sexual confusion, as ever, is Puck – played barefoot, with punkish physicality and a dash of Northern camp by David Moorst; but here he’s doing the bidding of Titania (Christie’s Hippolyta transformed by a flowing green dress), not Oberon (Chris again).
This simple and logical switch means that the comically cursed, ass-headed Bottom for once becomes the amorous darling of the king of the fairies. Part of a cohort of boiler-suited “mechanicals” seemingly dragooned into their am-dram Pyramus and Thisbe as part of an outreach programme, “Bully Bottom” is played to ebullient perfection by Hammed Animashaun. The pair’s contrived devotion reaches a climax as they writhe in a mobile boudoir, Beyoncé’s Love on Top loudly blaring; they emerge later chinking champagne glasses in a bubble bath.
At times, it’s laugh-a-minute stuff – some of the gags achieved through interpolated modern chat (“Babe, babe, not now, I’ve got a headache”, a lounging Animashaun coos). Yet the liberty-taking, which stretches to suggest same-sex curiosity between the male and female Athenian lovers, too, remains true to the spirit of the play and its grasp of our emotional slipperiness and weathervane longings.
“I have had a most rare vision,” wonders Bottom, rousing from his slumber. It’s a vision honoured here; combining eroticism and enchantment, levity and darkness, Hytner’s latest hit scales the heights.