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Nicholas Hytner’s acrobatic, erotic, playfully queered version of Shakespeare’s Dream seems even more delightful now than it was in 2019. It’s a fully immersive show, with audience members in the Bridge’s hi-tech pit (there are seats too) swirling around action at ground level and on raised rostra but also gazing up at bodies twisting and flexing in silk slings up in the air. It’s beautifully staged and acted, thought provoking, technically brilliant, and ends up with a party. Seriously, what’s not to like?
Here, Shakespeare’s Athens is a place of monochrome, orthodox conformity, while the nocturnal fairy forest to which everyone escapes is a subconscious world built out of vine-twined beds, where deepest fears and darkest fantasies can be played out. In the city, Susannah Fielding’s Hippolyta is confined to a glass cage while a headscarfed choir hymns her impending nuptials to Theseus (a languid JJ Feild).
In the multicoloured dreamland of fabulously flexible fairies, it’s her imperious queen Titania who drugs his king Oberon into sleeping with a human commoner transformed into a donkey, rather than vice versa. A massively useful corrective, particularly given that Emmanuel Akwafo’s sweet-natured Bottom, the aforementioned ass, seems instantly into it.
Here, Titania and her sidekick Puck (a protean, muscular and sardonically northern David Moorst) don’t just twist the heterosexual preferences of the four young lovers lost in the forest, they take them for a walk on the same-sex side too. Relative newcomer Nina Cassells and total newcomer Lily Simpkiss are great as the two women, particularly in the combative scenes orchestrated by movement director Arlene Phillips with their male counterparts, ably played by Paul Adeyefa and Divesh Subaskaran.
Bottom and his fellow artisans, rehearsing a dreadful play for Theseus’s wedding, are treated with more dignity and delicacy than is usual. The whole cast is allowed a measure of ad lib or embellishment, as in Shakespeare’s day. This is a gift to Akwafo, who is funny down to his bones, but also to the drily acerbic Fielding and to Moorst, who has further honed his interaction with audience members since he played Puck in 2019.
Winner of the Emerging Talent prize in the Evening Standard’s 2016 Theatre Awards, the sinewy, brutally mulleted Moorst really is extraordinary, at times like a bird, at others a watchful lizard. Usually, the superlative stage management team shift spectators out of the way of the action, but twice Moorst is left to part the crowds himself with a pugnacious “Move!” followed by a dismissive, tutting “Londoners…!”
Total theatre nerds will relish the echoes of the circus elements in Peter Brook’s famous 1970 Dream for the RSC: others can just enjoy the superior aerial skills for what they are. The soundtrack includes Dizzee Rascal, Beyonce and Serge Gainsbourg. If I have one minor quibble it’s with some of the costumes.
I loved the boilersuits and community-theatre sweatshirts for the artisans, and the Pride-parade outfits for the junior fairies, but Fielding is given a ghastly array of 80s outfits and a hairstyle borrowed from a Mandarin duck. Field, meanwhile, can’t get out of his horrid get-ups quick enough. Mind you, with a physique like his, I’d be the same.
Like I say, minor quibbles. I can’t remember enjoying a Dream more.
Bridge Theatre, to Aug 20; bridgetheatre.co.uk
