Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back.
To bring you up to speed, it’s a show in the same lineage as the Bridge’s recent Guys and Dolls: designed by Bunnie Christie, half the audience sit in the round, while the other half stand on the floor where the fairy-filled action of Shakespeare’s comedy unfurls on mobile platforms that rise and fall around them (I stood, only cowards sit).
It is joyously queer: pretty much everyone in it gets a crack at snogging everybody else. And Hytner’s key textual intervention is swapping the bulk of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania’s lines, meaning that it’s JJ Feild’s Oberon – not Susannah Fielding’s Titania – who has it off with Emmanuel Akwafo’s exuberant Bottom.
Has much changed since last time? It doesn’t feel vastly different conceptually, though new leads Feild and Fielding put a different spin on what are very explicitly the lead roles. As is tradition they also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta in the bookending Athens-set sections, but there is the strong suggestion that they in fact play the same characters throughout.
Feild is harder edged and more menacing than his predecessor Oliver Chris in the Athens sections; when playing Oberon there’s a softness and vulnerability there. It’s a performance sympathetic to the production’s suggestion that the bulk of the play is Theseus’s dream, in which his cruel machismo is broken via a spell cast on him by Fielding’s Hippolyta-slash-Titania.
Fielding has been too busy with screen work to do a play in a decade, which is a shame as she’s one of those actors who is unfailingly brilliant in everything she does. More charismatic and less ethereal than her predecessor in the role Gwendoline Christie, Fielding distinguishes herself by going the full Tom Cruise and doing all her own stunts.There’s a lot of aerial work in this show, largely enacted by the faeries, chief among them the returning David Moorst’s deadpan anarchist of a Puck. But unlike Christie, Fielding gets in on it too, spending much of the play suspended from silks, giving her Titania an otherworldly quality that explicitly separates her from the earthbound Oberon.
I’m not going to get into a blow-by-blow account of every change, but the basic point is the new actors are bloody great and the show remains a hoot.
Is it entirely coherent? Not really. Led by Felicity Montagu’s waffling Peter Quince and Akwafo’s savant-with-diva tendencies Bottom, the Mechanicals never really slot into the rest of it and often feel like they’re out to get a laugh at any costs. The whole Theseus-is-Oberon-Hippolyta-is-Titania arc is tangible but blurry: in the first scene Theseus has Hippolyta imprisoned in a glass box; in the last they’re just acting like a normal couple. What actually changed? The dream may have mellowed him but the dots aren’t really joined.
Does any of this matter? Not really: there’s enough textual rigour for the Bard-heads, but really it’s a production that just pelts you with cool stuff for three hours and wins your heart that way. If you’re not cooing at the virtuoso staging you’ll be gawping at the circus work or goggling at who is kissing who. And if all else fails, it ends with three giant inflatable moons dropped into the auditorium for us to pummel around. Not Hytner’s most meticulous hour, but you’d have to be dead not to enjoy it.
