DREAM ON!
Five years on, beyond Covid lockdowns and its magnificent Guys and Dolls, here again is the Bridge’s irresistible multi-mouse take on Shakespeare’s sunniest comedy of love. In 2019 I wrote:
“A dream of a Dream…one expected fun from the combination of Nicholas Hytner, a roiling mass of promenaders in the pit and a Bunny Christie design making free with the new theatre’s technical tricks. There is nothing rude about the Bridge’s mechanicals: beds fly and travel, pits open, platforms appear, gymnastic fairies somersault overhead on six sets of aerial silks, and David Moorst’s nicely yobbish-adolescent Puck has one very “Wow!” exit move”.
It’s all still there – Moorst indeed is himself back again, a scornful leather-and tattoos Manc rocker. I remarked too, and feel it all the movee powerfully now on the far side of five hard years for the youngest aong us, that this production breathes glorious, exhilarating, club-night youthfulness. Not only because it takes advantage of the new wave of cabaret-skilled aerialists , and demands gymnastic agility even from its more senior cast who leap and swing on bedsteads and silks, but by its fearless happiness. There’s a larky sexual fluidity , and a Gen-Z sense of escape from a grey grim adult male establishment (the Athens opening feelsconventual, soberly chanting , with Hippolyta captive on glass, unsmiling. Nor is the youthfulness just because of the cheeky ad-lib modernisms from the fleeing lovers and the Rude Mechanicals (who does not melt when Bottom borrows an iphone from the pit crowd to check the moon dates and keeps it for a selfie?}.
No, the big rejuvenation lies also in two things which elevate the show to realms of unexpected glee. Hytner pursues, as most modern interpreters do, the sense that the forest world, the “fierce vexation of a dream” , releases the humanity of people trapped in the formal stiffness of the court. That psychological captivity includes Duke Theseus himself and his unwilling bride Hippolyta the Amazon. This sense is beautifully evoked, as the dreamworld’s brass bedsteads develop a thicket of leaves and flowers and the four young lovers leap and romp between them and finally, sweetly, awake confused , four in a bed which was once a grassy bank, looking up with real foreboding at stern Theseus in hunting-gear, wakened from his Oberon dream.
And the other thing that had us whooping both five years ago and now, even up in the gallery (I chickened out of the pit as usual). Hytner decided to “reassign” some 300 key lines, so that it is not Titania who is conned and bewitched in their quarrel over a changeling child, but Oberon. Apart from a sneaky feminist thrill, it just happens to be FUNNIER to have a man conned into bed with a monster than when it happens to a woman (as in real life, er, it often does). JJ Feild is a stern Oberon beautifully humbled by his delusion, and Susanna Fielding queenly, lively, likeable Titania, later as Hippolyta giving her man a knowing glance, reminding him that he has been a ridiculous twerking dupe in a thong alongside Bottom. Who, this time, is a very entertaining Emmanuel Akwafo, camp as ninepence in his preening yet oddly, briefly, suddenly and unexpectely touching at the moment when he realizes someone at last really fancies him. The look he gives Oberon in that delighted moment is memorable days later.
And I had forgotten how funny is the brief late scene when Theseus has to decide which of the proffered entertainments to watch. Even the fag-smoking, balloon-popping “tipsy muses” are not as funny as the literary chap in a jacket representing “The thrice-three Muses mourning for the death of learning” even though it lasts only seconds…
Perfect. All the silliness and solemnity, on a grand night out. And a celebration of this theatre – all theatres – which survived the pandemic lockdown disaster to let us breathe, laugh and cheer again, hugger-mugger fearless.
Bridgetheatre.co.uk to 20 august
rating 5
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