The Power of the Pre-set: Displaying Hippolyta in Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream @ The Bridge Theatre
Over the course of its run at the Bridge Theatre, I saw Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times — June, July and August. As Ben discusses in his article on Sean Holmes’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, there are inevitable changes over the course of a run as plays bed in and actors start to experiment. This all adds to the excitement of theatre — no two shows are ever the same. However, I was struck by, what I considered to be, a major change between my June viewing and those later in the run. My PhD research focusses on what happens before the show — before the first word is spoken — and pre-sets are a fascinating example of this. They move the audience from real life to the world of the play: a buffer zone between reality and make-believe. It was in this pre-set that Hytner’s production introduced the largest change.
In my June viewing, the theatre opened 30 minutes before the show with atmospheric smoke and a dull background noise reminiscent of a church bell tolling somewhere in the distance. The promenading audience in the pit milled around, uncertain where to stand as stage managers in costume suggestive, to me, of traditional Amish dress cordoned off a section of the pit with ropes. The tolling bell got louder and a display box was rolled into the centre of the pit, flanked by a guard of similarly dressed actors. Hippolyta (Gwendoline Christie) stood imperious in the box: a defiant stance. The actors began to sing in plain chant, focussed on the displayed Hippolyta. They moved with each verse to face a different direction, Christie rotating each time to face the actors and a different section of the audience.
As a promenading audience member, I was an active participant in public humiliation. I found myself uncharacteristically taking a photograph, sharing instantaneously on Instagram this public event, knowing that the wider interest would not simply be that I was at the theatre again, but rather that I was able to photograph the famous Christie. Displaying Hippolyta as “Queen of the Amazons” in a perspex box, demurely dressed, an exhibit, was a deeply disturbing start to the production — Hytner undercutting the promised mayhem with a stark reminder that Hippolyta was a prize, the spoils of war, wooed with a sword. Consent issues were brought to the fore.
Timing is everything. As Ronan will discuss later this week in his review of the NT Live screening of the production, Hytner may have been aiming to reference Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. However, fresh off the Game of Thrones finale in May 2019, I couldn’t help but see echoes of Christie’s character in the HBO series, Brienne of Tarth. The puritanical dress was suddenly evocative not of the Amish, or The Handmaid’s Tale, but rather the Faith of Seven in Game of Thrones. The public display of Hippolyta, accompanied by a plain chant, drew comparison, for me, to the public shaming of Cersei Lannister in the Season 5 finale. Brienne of Tarth is Game of Thrones’ poster girl for female power — the first female knight and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Brienne’s refusal to accept traditional female roles in Westeros carried across into Hytner’s gender/character-swapped forest of Athens, which saw Titania rather than Oberon in control of the love potion device. This Hippolyta, and by extension the double cast Titania (also Christie), was powerful and was going to fight back.
There were interesting parallels later in the play. Oberon’s (Oliver Chris) love scenes with the transformed Bottom (Hammed Animashaun) were presented in a metal four-poster bed, a nod to the metal-framed Perspex box that presented Hippolyta. Much as the audience were expected to judge Hippolyta as displayed, the metal-framed bed acted in the same manner. However, in stark contrast, this display of euphoric, homosexual love was liberating. Sexualised fairies moved in and out of the frame, creating a link between the audience space and display space. As with the display case during the pre-set, the mobile audience were encouraged to follow the bed as it was rolled around the pit, displaying Oberon and Bottom’s love to all corners of the audience and making those watching in the pit active participants once again.
However, later in the run, the pre-set changed. Hippolyta was no longer displayed during the pre-set, but rather brought in at the start of the play, as is more usual, alongside Theseus. For me, the pre-set lost its power. Funereal and sombre yes, but without the uncomfortable public display, it lost its impact. In the later modified version, I was a spectator — brought in to judge Theseus rather than Hippolyta. A subtle difference, but one that could change how the ultimate treatment of Oberon (double cast again with Chris playing both Theseus and Oberon) by Titania is viewed. With Hytner’s production inferring that the Hippolyta/Theseus and Titania/Oberon relationships are inextricably linked, ultimately how I view the Oberon/Bottom love story impacts on my view of Theseus. I was still encouraged to take part in the positive public presentation of joyous love, but excluded from, and encouraged to judge, Theseus’s earlier public humiliation of Hippolyta.
If we see theatre as an agent for social change, a mirror as it were to wider society, in this amended pre-set the opportunity to effect change is reduced. In the earlier version, I, the viewing public, was taken on a similar journey to that of Theseus/Oberon — actively participating in both his public humiliation of Hippolyta and his own public humiliation. In the second, I was placed in a superior position: Hytner already assumed I had been been changed, judging Theseus for his treatment of Hippolyta and revelling in the joy of Oberon’s love affair with Bottom.
