This is still the finest A Midsummer Night's Dream I have ever seen
Back in 2019, I gave five stars to Nicholas Hytner's 'immersive' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. His achievement was to take Shakespeare's over-familiar comedy of romantic confusion – in which young lovers and bumbling am-dram actors come unstuck in the Athenian forest - and make it fun, funny, beautiful, revelatory and, yes, sexy. His master-stroke: magicking the action amid, and above, standing spectators (the rest seated), employing daring circusy high jinks. The success here is to make a proven delight – the finest Dream I've seen – stir wonder again; even if you're re-encountering the show, it still seems fresh and strange, a shared reverie you never want to end.
That's down to the fact that like much of the audience, the superb cast – mainly new but with some old faces (among them David Moorst as the anarchic sprite Puck) – are kept on their toes throughout. The space works like some hallucinogenic kaleidoscope; locations emerge through the floor and then, in the twinkling of an eye, submerge. Some of the actors are more like stunt-artists than others – Moorst bursting up through, and down into, a mattress, say, or sardonically delivering his lines upside down; the fairies flying and tumbling overhead on sheet ropes. But all must rise to the occasion of split-second timing. Wit and lyricism run in tandem with physical prowess. Whether it be an insightful emphasis or a giggle-making ad-lib – not a moment of the evening is slack.
Hytner's canny re-framing of the action remains intact. Amid a pre-show display of devout ritual reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale, we first see the captured Amazonian queen Hippolyta in a glass cabinet, like an exhibit (Susannah Fielding static, defiant and compelling). Her enforced impending marriage to her captor, Theseus, makes her sympathetic towards young Hermia (Nina Cassells), overruled in love by her father – and it's as if she casts a corrective spell over the court.
Theseus becomes Oberon as he tosses and turns at night (Bunny Christie's design maximising the use of beds as woody dens and play-pens). Thereafter, as Hippolyta becomes Titania, queen of the fairies, she acquires vengeful agency in a flip of the usual scenario; it's Oberon (not she) who falls, nectar-tainted, for the ass-translated Bottom. The genius of this device is that it turns a planned humiliation into a 'queer' celebration, Emmanuel Akwafo's gloriously funny Bottom and JJ Feild's rippling Oberon are camply trundled round the auditorium in their boudoir to the pumping strains of Beyoncé's Love on Top.
At the same time, the play's core question about who we desire, and why, and how that shapes us – is brought exhilaratingly to the fore, in all its complexity and confusion. There's much more, ravingly, to say but let's stick with this: perfect.
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