‘Athens Got Talent’: Reversal, Immersion and the Extra-Textual in NT Live: A Midsummer Night’s Dream @ The Bridge Theatre
Last week I attended the NT Live broadcast of Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Bridge Theatre and it is an experience which I will never forget. Just as Peter Brook’s seminal RSC production struck a chord in the 1970s with its minimalist staging and darker, adult take on Shakespeare’s comedy, so I expect director Hytner’s immersive, pop culture savvy production to become one which defines future Dreams for decades to come.
Despite the largely carnivalesque tenor of this production (which felt as palpable in the cinema as in the theatre), the production opened on an unexpectedly sombre note. A procession of black clad men and women entered the stage singing in plain chant, thus conjuring a funereal mood as opposed the ‘nuptial hour’ promised in Theseus’s (Oliver Chris) opening line.
The costumes of the female characters, the audience had been told in the opening commentary before the production began, were supposedly evocative of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which has found renewed cultural currency in recent years due to a successful television adaptation and its resonance with contemporary feminist movements such as #MeToo.
This was underlined by the production’s first (of many) spectacular effects as Hippolyta (Gwendoline Christie) was transported onstage, trapped inside a sleek glass cage which reminded the audience of her status as a captive queen, a fact over which so many productions choose to elide. Gemma wrote about this aspect of the production in detail in her article earlier this week, offering a deeper dive into that image and its connections to Christie’s role as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones.
Not only is Hippolyta a prisoner to a conquering duke but Hermia (Isis Hainsworth) is also greatly mistreated in this opening scene as it is assumed that she is the property of both her father and intended husband, despite her protestations that she wishes to marry another man of her choosing. The decision to draw out these more insidious themes from one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies by connecting them to memorable feminist imagery in popular culture was therefore highly astute.
One of the key feature’s of this production were the modern linguistic additions to Shakespeare’s text which, although initially jarring in the serious opening scenes at court, felt incredibly natural once delivered by the Rude Mechanicals in their first appearance onstage. The Bridge Theatre’s immersive pit also allowed actors to use the audience in inventive and involving ways, such as when the Mechanicals wish to consult a ‘calendar’ in Act 3 Scene 1 to know whether the moon will shine during their performance.
Given the ‘extra-textual’ additions to Shakespeare’s text already established early on in the production, it therefore made perfect sense for the cast to break out into the audience and decide to consult the Calendar app in an audience member’s phone. This not only updated the scene to incorporate the changing sense of what the word ‘calendar’ means but gave way to hilarious unspoken remonstrations when the Mechanicals became side-tracked by looking through said phone at images which we can only assume were illicit. The extract from the broadcast below features this moment in all its glory.
Hammed Animashaun’s extraordinary Bottom shone particularly brightly during these anachronistic moments. His naturalistic delivery and a wide comedic range encompassed everything from deadpan moments able to draw laughs by the merest eyebrow raise to the best version of Pyramus’s ludicrously overlong and overblown suicide which I’ve ever witnessed.
However, it would be remiss not to mention Felicity Montagu’s understated Quince, who provided the perfect foil for her shrieking, scene-stealing counterpart. There was a perfectly acute balance between tension and affection at the heart of their relationship. Despite Bottom’s leading thespian/backseat director pushing against the rules imposed by Quince’s put-upon actor-manager, it was nevertheless clear that they were pulling in the same direction and this ensured that those scenes were some of the production’s best.
In a further attempt to redress the gender imbalance and biases of Shakespeare’s play, Hytner chose to swap many of the lines delivered by Oberon (Oliver) and Titania (Christie). It is this decision, perhaps, that served the production most effectively. Now with the lion’s share of the lines, Christie was a truly powerful Titania, displaying brilliant armography (thanks Strictly) and radiating majestical power which will be familiar to anyone who has seen her steal each Game of Thrones scene in which she features.
The reversal of Fairy King and Queen was particularly effective in the inclusion of a subtle twist at the play’s end that — thanks to Oliver and Christie playing both the magical and mortal monarchs — Hippolyta may have secretly conjured the fairy kingdom to terrorise her husband-to-be. Hytner chose to keep this ambiguous but it was an inspired suggestion and made sense of the decision to have the same two actors play these roles.
Christie was ably supported by a nimble, creepy, day-glo Puck, played by David Moorst who delivered a brilliantly original iteration of the beloved fairy: think Lee Evans meets Willem Dafoe. Moorst not only displayed a spectacular array of acrobatics but oscillated between mischievous contempt for the lovers he poisoned and genuine pathos once he realised the extent to which they had suffered. Like Animashaun, his delivery of the extra-textual additions felt incredibly natural, whilst the blurring of the fairy and courtly world were sinisterly underscored by his additional role as a quietly malevolent Philostrate.
An example of the production’s attention to detail and its capacity to elevate oft-forgotten moments in this oft-performed play was Philostrate’s address to the three couples prior to the Rude Mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Prior to Theseus selecting their play, an array of other options are delivered by Philostrate and, rather than skate over these in the audience’s anticipation of Dream’s grand comedic climax, Hytner instead chose to have actors (who had already featured as fairies) appear onstage to represent those alternatives.
These ranged from a group of women grotesquely entangled in red balloons to a vaudevillian entertainer creating a paper chain of people, all of which was in service of an inspired final gag. Theseus’s decision was framed as a reality television-esque winner reveal, underscored by ever-diminishing lights and the dramatic music which erupted once the Mechanicals had been selected. Their adorable purple jumpers (which read ‘Rude Mechanicals’ on the back) underscored their position as amateurs amidst professionals. Truly, Athens Got Talent.
In my next article, I’ll focus in greater detail on these references to modern culture and, in particular, the popular music which featured throughout this dream of a show.
