This Midsummer Night's Dream is so deliciously, deliriously sexy you won't want to wake up, says Georgina Brown
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Bridge Theatre, London)
Verdict: A dream of a Dream
Rating:
Nick Hytner's dark 'immersive' staging of Shakespeare's comedy of errors punctures any airy-fairy notions about love being dreamy.
Erotic certainly, but so nearly a tragedy of errors for the lovers, all of them variously bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
This Athens is patriarchal and oppressive.
Susannah Fielding's clenched Queen of the Amazons stands inside a glass box: a captive installation.
Her engagement to Duke Theseus (J.J. Feild) is anything but a love match. Moreover, Egeus has forbidden his daughter Hermia from marrying the man she loves. It's his choice — or the nunnery.
It's a show filled with highlights and high camp. Quite literally.
In fairyland, bedsteads drop from the roof from which sexy, sequined fairies tumble and twirl in skeins of fabric and perform a fabulous ariel dance routine, their timing impeccable.
David Moorst's gobby, yobby hobgoblin Puck, master of mischief-making, appears from and disappears into a mattress.
Lovers endlessly find themselves in bed — and in love — with the wrong person.
Hytner's gender-bending, disorientating frolic has the fairy king becoming enraptured by Bottom, the lowly weaver who has been magicked into an ass.
The two emerge from a bath, their modesty protected by bubbles. 'How I dote on thee!' drools besotted Oberon. 'I've got a headache,' says Emmanuel Akwafo's show-stealing Bottom, turning over in bed, in one of many hilarious interjections not entirely Shakespearean.
Having been peripatetic among the promenaders to begin with, I enjoyed the view far better from my seat, though was sorry not to be down there partying to Beyonce's Love On Top which wraps up this delirious Dream.
A tiny quibble: too little spark between Titania and Oberon, both of whom seem more excited by the alternative possibilities this extraordinary night has unexpectedly suggested.
Hytner's investigation of human sexual fluidity (which Shakespeare was clearly so aware of) reveals this infinitely rich play afresh. Dazzling.
A Midsummer Night's Dream runs until August 20 at the Bridge Theatre.
4:48 Psychosis (Royal Court Upstairs)
Verdict: A dark night of a soul
Rating:
Celebrated playwright Sarah Kane's final work was first staged in this very theatre 25 years ago...just months after she hanged herself, aged 28.
In it, she explores the long dark night of the soul experienced by the severely depressed. When sleeplessness and hopelessness make it seem that death is the only way out.
The play was regarded as Kane's 'suicide note': a terrible and terrifying howl of anguish.
In hindsight, her stylistic daring and accomplishment seems to have been underrated. Because this remains an extraordinary, original play which has not dated one iota.
Indeed, a quarter of a century on, revived by the same director, James Macdonald, and the same trio of actors — Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes and Madeleine Potter — its nihilism is even more potent, and harrowing.
Once again, the rawness of emotion hits you like a truck. There is no setting, no plot, no characters, just fractured lines and jagged fragments, splinters of a broken mind, which Macdonald has ingeniously distributed among his remarkable cast.
Images and phrases recur, of cockroaches, beetles, lists of medication (useless), the platitudes of psychiatrists (so-called 'surgeons of the soul') who neither understand nor heal.
Once again, a vast sloping mirror provides another angle on the 'characters'. Sometimes, the shadows of a window frame appears to crucify them. Prone, their bodies resemble corpses.
Now 25 years older, these more lived-in actors bring something new to the piece: a sense that decades of this unremitting mental torture, 'this infernal state of siege', have prolonged and intensified the agony. A sense of ever-increasing self-hatred, bitterness and fury caused by the inability to love...or be loved.
This time round the gallows humour seems more savage. One character has plans to 'take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself'.
'It wouldn't work,' responds another, with the weary irony of one who has been there, done that and failed.
Brutally honest, utterly bleak, this is only for the brave.
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