DREAM ON!
Five years on, past Covid lockdowns and its magnificent Guys and Dolls, right here once more is the Bridge’s irresistible multi-mouse tackle Shakespeare’s sunniest comedy of affection. 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 transfer”.
It’s all nonetheless there – Moorst certainly is himself again once more, a scornful leather-and tattoos Manc rocker. I remarked too, and really feel it all of the movee powerfully now on the far facet of 5 onerous years for the youngest aong us, that this manufacturing breathes superb, exhilarating, club-night youthfulness. Not solely as a result of it takes benefit of the brand new wave of cabaret-skilled aerialists , and calls for gymnastic agility even from its extra senior forged who leap and swing on bedsteads and silks, however by its fearless happiness. There’s a larky sexual fluidity , and a Gen-Z sense of escape from a gray grim grownup male institution (the Athens opening feelsconventual, soberly chanting , with Hippolyta captive on glass, unsmiling. Nor is the youthfulness simply due to the cheeky ad-lib modernisms from the fleeing lovers and the Rude Mechanicals (who doesn’t soften when Bottom borrows an iphone from the pit crowd to test the moon dates and retains it for a selfie?}.
No, the massive rejuvenation lies additionally in two issues which elevate the present to realms of surprising glee. Hytner pursues, as most trendy interpreters do, the sense that the forest world, the “fierce vexation of a dream” , releases the humanity of individuals trapped within the formal stiffness of the courtroom. That psychological captivity contains Duke Theseus himself and his unwilling bride Hippolyta the Amazon. This sense is superbly evoked, because the dreamworld’s brass bedsteads develop a thicket of leaves and flowers and the 4 younger lovers leap and romp between them and eventually, sweetly, awake confused , 4 in a mattress which was as soon as a grassy financial institution, trying up with actual foreboding at stern Theseus in hunting-gear, wakened from his Oberon dream.
And the opposite factor that had us whooping each 5 years in the past and now, even up within the gallery (I chickened out of the pit as normal). Hytner determined to “reassign” some 300 key strains, in order that it isn’t Titania who’s conned and bewitched of their quarrel over a changeling youngster, however Oberon. Apart from a sneaky feminist thrill, it simply occurs to be FUNNIER to have a person conned into mattress with a monster than when it occurs to a girl (as in actual life, er, it typically does). JJ Feild is a stern Oberon superbly humbled by his delusion, and Susanna Fielding queenly, full of life, likeable Titania, later as Hippolyta giving her man a understanding look, reminding him that he has been a ridiculous twerking dupe in a thong alongside Bottom. Who, this time, is a really entertaining Emmanuel Akwafo, camp as ninepence in his preening but oddly, briefly, abruptly and unexpectely touching in the mean time when he realizes somebody ultimately actually fancies him. The look he offers Oberon in that delighted second is memorable days later.
And I had forgotten how humorous is the temporary late scene when Theseus has to determine which of the proffered entertainments to look at. Even the fag-smoking, balloon-popping “tipsy muses” are usually not as humorous because the literary chap in a jacket representing “The thrice-three Muses mourning for the death of learning” though it lasts solely seconds…
Perfect. All the silliness and solemnity, on a grand evening out. And a celebration of this theatre – all theatres – which survived the pandemic lockdown catastrophe to allow us to breathe, chortle and cheer once more, hugger-mugger fearless.
Bridgetheatre.co.uk to twenty august
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