A Queered-Up Masterpiece: ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Bridge Theatre
Nicholas Hytner brings Shakespeare firmly into the twenty-first century.
(I want to highlight that viewing the action through a camera means that I was, obviously, slightly removed from the live event, so I can’t comment on the experience of those in the pit. Most people can’t, though, and my viewing experience was just as valid as those who could afford to get to London.
This review contains spoilers.
Anyway, disclaimers out the way — let’s get on with it!)
I had the privilege of attending a National Theatre live-streaming of the Shakespeare classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Nicholas Hytner, on the 17th of October.
I wasn’t sure what to expect as I settled into my criminally comfortable seat at Exeter Picturehouse, and the opening scene the most sobering picture of Athens that I’ve ever seen in performance — a Handmaid’s Tale inspired, puritanical vision of Christie encased in a sterile glass box, in a boxy black dress, sneered at by Oliver Chris as Theseus, who was the picture of a villainous patriarchal dictator.
The scene plays up the misogyny of the opening scene and holds nothing back in confronting us with the horror of forced marriage. Theseus’ imposing will only becomes more oppressive in his uncomfortable handling of a teary-eyed Hermia as she pleads for her own autonomy.
The bleakness of this opening had me slightly concerned, wondering if I was strapping myself in for a tragic re-imagining of Dream that would leave me feeling more uneasy than joyful.
However, Hytner does something so much more enjoyable to watch — through a few tweaks and an imaginative, playful, twenty-first century lens, he turns the play on its head into something Will would have adored.
This production, from the moment the characters step into the magical fairy realm of the Athenian forest, queers it to hell.
The shift happens when Hytner so seamlessly switches the dialogue between Titania and Oberon that the change hardly registered with me until the end of their fight.
Whereas in the original text the patriarchy is changed but ever-present in the forest, it is abolished in the re-write. It makes for a more tonally coherent piece in general. Yeah, that’s right — it actually improves what Shakespeare wrote. Oberon shifts from the picture of heterosexual patriarchy in action to a feminine, emotive fairy King from the moment he lays eyes on Hammed Aminashaun as Bottom. His seduction of Bottom was hilarious, and had all of us squealing with glee and roaring with laughter as all pretense goes out the window, and they perform an erotic dance to Beyonce’s ‘Love on Top’. Rainbows and glitter are everywhere. It’s pure gold.
Not only that, but Hytner has Puck interfere during the fights between the four lovers to make them even more sexually charged than the text implies to the point where Lysander and Demetrius pounce on each other and rip their clothes off, followed by a make-out scene between Hermia and Helena.
I, like many people, was drawn in mostly by the knowledge that Gwendoline Christie, popular actor from Game of Thrones, would be part of the cast. Christie makes a perfect Titania and Hippolyta, and she balances the contrast of a playful fairy and warrior queen with skill and grace.
However, David Moorst as Puck is the performer I came away most astounded by. All of the fairies perform fantastic aerial sequences and contort their bodies gracefully from up in the air to give the appearance of flying, and Moorst performs the most amazing tricks out of all of them, despite being the newest in the cast to aerial acrobatics.
Like Tinkerbell, he seems only capable of one emotion at a time, and throws himself manically into fits of rage, giggling euphoria and mischievous, sadistic delight. I loved watching him use his feet as hands and swing from the ribbons as naturally as a monkey swings from tree to tree, making him both ethereal and unnervingly animalistic.
I took a while to warm to Animashaun’s Bottom as he is played quite naturalistically and innocently, but by the end he had me practically in tears. He has impeccable comic timing and watching him go from arrogance to screaming and cowering in a split second got me no matter how many times he repeated the gag. I could honestly watch him do it for days.
I also want to quickly mention how much I loved the fact that the Rude Mechanicals made fun of us theatre kids by, through a stroke of genius, having their Pyramus and Thisbe begin with a hammy physical theatre piece-slash-interpretive dance. It took me back to many cringey performances I’d rather forget, in the best way possible.
There were a few things that didn’t quite work for me, but they are few and far between. For example, the staging felt a bit too clever at times. The actors were very restricted in their movement by having them on tiny platforms that moved around, and I didn’t really see the point in the mechanics being as complicated as they were.
I’m undecided as to whether I think the first scene worked. I definitely got what Hytner was going for by having it be such a stark contrast, but it set the tone for something very different to the rest of play and it took me a while for me to pull myself out of that mindset.
It also does nag at you when the play finishes that the lovers are returning to such an oppressive regime, and the play skirts over those implications. Once the haze of the forest has disappeared from their memories, will Theseus go back to treating Hippolyta as a war trophy? Will the lovers’ love fade and they become jaded and oppressed themselves for the rest of their lives? I guess even this text cant be made completely free of uncomfortable sexist implications.
This was for unapologetically queer theatre kids, for a new generation, for those of us who have had to suppress who we are. I hope productions like this continue to break boundaries and acknowledge the legacy of queer influence in theatre dating back to Will himself so that more people my age feel like this is a space they can see themselves in.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
[4/5 stars]
[Photos by Manuel Harlan]
