I went to a dance club with a couple of famous TV actors on Friday. I also sampled a Glastonbury-like music festival. Then there were some Cirque de Soleil style acrobats doing ridiculously impossible things while hanging from silken sheets. And there was Shakespeare.
Rather remarkably, it was all Shakespeare.
The Bridge Theatre's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream may be the most fun I have ever had in a theatre. (Well, it's pipped to the comedy post by Book of Mormon, but it's close.) This is Shakespeare's most accessible play. With the highly-physical comedy of love potions gone wrong, and its famous play-within-a-play open to lots of interpretation, it's not so important that you grasp every nuance of the 400-year-old language. It was my introduction to Shakespeare on a grade school trip and it's the play I've seen most, through numerous Shakespeare festivals, summer park productions and interpretations on the lawns of English country houses. There are at least three major film versions, the classic being the 1999 outing with Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Kline, Rupert Everett and Stanley Tucci. (Highly recommended.) But I've never enjoyed it more than I did in this rollicking, modern production.
At the start, I wasn't sure that would be the case. We entered to see the star attraction, Gwendoline Christie (better known to millions of fans as Game of Thrones' Brienne of Tarth) incarcerated in a glass box as the audience filed in around her. As with last year's exceptional Julius Caesar, this production was in the round with the "groundlings" playing an active role throughout. As the action started, the costuming was decidedly channelling The Handmaid's Tale, with everyone in sober colours and the women all wearing headscarves and sensible shoes. The interpretation highlights a plot point that's often overlooked in productions: the impending nuptials are forced ones. The hero Theseus won the Amazon Queen Hippolyta by defeating her in battle. This is not a love match but an act of political subjugation. Thus the casting of Christie was inspired; enraged, brooding warrior maiden is old hat for her.
Fortunately, things get brighter very quickly and we spend most of the play in the fairy world in the forests beyond Athens where Christie and Oliver Chris (a stalwart of British stage and TV, best known for the play King Charles III on both) play Titania and Oberon, queen and king of the fairies, as well as Hippolyta and Theseus. As is traditional. What is most definitely not traditional is that this production swaps parts, giving Titania the lines meant for Oberon and vice versa. Meaning that it's the man who falls into a ridiculous enchanted passion with a donkey-headed rustic, while the woman manipulates the action.
Not only does this bring some much needed balance to a play where the women are traditionally the subservient characters, but it's just plain funnier. And Chris is a genius of physical comedy. The scenes of passionate courtship between his Oberon and the Barry White wanna-be Bottom, played by Hammed Animashaun, will have you laughing so hard you'll be fighting to breathe. While the whole cast is strong it's these two, rather than the crowd-pulling Christie, who deliver the most memorable performances.
Christie is excellent as well, unsurprisingly, and brings a dignity to the role we don't usually see from Titania. She is a loving wife teaching her spoiled and complacent husband a much needed lesson before their warm reunion.
The groundlings are as much a character as the actors. They dance, they cheer, they join hands and circle the stage as bewitched lovers commit their madness. At one point, we shift scenes with an enormous white cloth being passed over their heads as pop music booms. The peasant players borrow a phone from the audience to check calendar dates, only returning it after a cast selfie. At the end, we all join in to the wedding festivities as cast and groundlings dance together, bouncing enormous inflatable moons around the theatre as Beyonce's Love on Top swells out of the sound system.
The staging makes the most of The Bridge's ability to bring blocks of the performance area up and down, constantly shifting the contours and location of the performance space along with the plot. They also put the gantry above the stage to good use, with the fairy folk doing impressive acrobatics in silk slings and beds levitate.
I'd ignore them all. This Midsummer is fun. Too many people think Shakespeare is about stuffy classics to be endured rather than enjoyed. Something only the highly educated can appreciate. What BS. Shakespeare was a man of the people who played to the masses. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the best examples of that. I think the The Bard would have loved this production, and would have been the centre of the party as the post-production dancing kicked off.
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