A Midsummer Night's Dream: a 'revelatory, fun, sexy' revival

A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bridge Theatre

The 'rules of gravity are forgotten' in this dazzling performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream

(Image credit: © Manuel Harlan)

Nicholas Hytner first staged Shakespeare's "over-familiar comedy of romantic confusion" at the Bridge Theatre in 2019, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. It was a raging success: a "funny, beautiful, revelatory and, yes, sexy" immersive production in which "circussy high jinks" were melded with thrilling design – locations emerging through the floor and then vanishing in the twinkling of an eye – and first-rate acting.

His great triumph with this revival is to make the "complex, hilarious and utterly exhilarating" show stir just as much wonder the second time around: even if you're re-encountering it, it "still seems fresh and strange, a shared reverie you never want to end"; it is the "finest Dream" I've seen.

In this production, the "rules of gravity are forgotten", said Kate Wyver in The Guardian. Led by David Moorst's "spiky, spidery" Puck, the "disco-ready fairies barely touch the ground, gambolling instead across bedframes and dangling effortlessly from loops of aerial silks". Their thrilling acrobatics have echoes of the landmark Peter Brook production of 1970, but "with more brazenly bisexual energy, which sweeps over the show like confetti". Hytner's masterstroke is to switch the dialogue of Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen. This adds new textures to the couple's power dynamic, and "gifts us Oberon's riotous seduction of Bottom, a scene so joyful the whole audience seems drunk on delight".

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It is not the most romantic of Dreams, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. The magic is "too turbocharged to make room for much true tenderness". But the thrill of the spectacle makes up for that, aided by some fabulous acting. Emmanuel Akwafo "digs deep into the fun of Bottom". The young lovers are spirited but naive, especially Lily Simpkiss's lovestruck Helena. Susannah Fielding "radiates silent rage as Hippolyta" and later Titania, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. All told, this is an "exuberant celebration of the transforming joys of both love and theatre" – endlessly playful and very funny.