Gwendoline Christie’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Chaotic Fun

If you want to adapt Shakespeare, this is the way to do it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my favourite Shakespearean comedies, and it is easy to see why. Among all his comedies, it is the most palatable for a modern audience. In 2015, I was able to bring my students to watch an adaptation of it performed by the Globe Theatre, and the fact that it sent 17/18 year old students into spasms of laughter is testament to how funny it is when done right. National Theatre’s version is certainly more modern than the Globe’s version, converting the Bridge Theatre space into this green-spaced forest, with audience members adorned with purple-flowered headdresses, standing amongst the raised green blocks that forms the forest space of the play.

This set-up also contributes to authentic moments with the audience members. Hammed Animashaun, who plays Bottom, requests an audience member’s phone at one point to check the status of the moon on the night of the Mechanicals’ performance, and the cast on stage gather cheekily to take a selfie with said phone. At one point, David Moorst’s Puck moves through the crowd and huffs at the ones in his way. “Londoners!” – he utters. Then an audience member responds with, “I’m Irish!” It is moments like this that reminds me of the true magic that comes from assembling at the theatre. Watching at home just doesn’t have the same energy of being amongst a group of people, who are strangers to you but somehow become fellow kin as we gather in this hallowed space we call theatre.

White bedding sit on top these green blocks, since dreaming is a huge aspect of the play. The actors sometimes move through the audience to get to certain green blocks, or dive into beds to disappear and appear elsewhere – the choreography is complex and impressive, considering the chaos inherent in the play. The fairies also hang from silks above, placing them on symbolically celestial levels given their magical status. It is truly the stuff of Cirque du Soleil as we watch them twirl on the silks in an impressive feat of physical theatre, though at times it feels more like the movements of gymnasts instead of supernatural fairies. David Moorst as Puck is the most impressive in this display of physical theatre, and truly considers how a fairy would move on these silks, delivering his soliloquies with such flourish and style.

Director Nicholas Hytner makes the interesting choice of swapping Oberon (Oliver Chris) and Titania’s (Gwendoline Christie) roles, where in the original play Oberon is the one who gets Puck to enchant Titania in order to compel her to give him a fairy changeling, but in this version, it is Titania doing the enchanting. This act gives Titania a measure of power the original didn’t bestow, but also creates a queer space within the play.

Due to the swap, Oberon ends up falling for Bottom, whose head has been converted to a donkey’s head (Puck thought it would be funny for some reason), and Chris (who plays Oberon and Thesus) and Animashaun really go all out with their romance, with the two sharing a bubble bath and numerous lovey-dovey moments. I don’t know how I feel about the choice of Beyonce’s Love On Top to be used as the musical backdrop to their lovemaking; it seems excessive but I also enjoyed the addition of contemporary music in a Shakespearean play.

Animashaun as Bottom is a particular stand-out, conveying Shakespeare’s words in such a naturally funny way. I laughed every single moment he was on stage. There are a few moments with the four lovers (Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius) in the forest that also add to the queerness in the play. This is to elevate the transgression inherent in the space of the play, where things get truly mad and chaotic, only to transition to a hyper-realistic conclusion. The four lovers, Hermia (Isis Hainsworth), Helena (Tessa Bonham Jones), Demetrius (Paul Adeyefa), and Lysander (Kit Young) are fun to watch, and offer a contemporary spin on their roles.

The hilarity of the Oberon/Bottom pairing carries on in the later parts of the play, since Chris also doubles as Thesus (Duke of Athens), and when Bottom performs with a troupe of actors towards the end of the play, Thesus seems to remember those moments shared with Bottom, a clever meta theatre nod, considering the whole ‘play within a play’ concept in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This meta quality is important, since it highlights the importance of imagination. When we as an audience enter a theatre space, we need to understand that we are entering an imaginative space that will be established by the play. When the Mechanicals perform Pyramus and Thisbe for the Athens royalty, they overexplain the concept of the play, pause to discuss the nature of the scene during the performance, and seek to reassure that the lion isn’t really a lion. This results in a blurring between reality and the imagined, with the troupe unwittingly bringing reality into the theatrical space because they fail to understand their role as performers. This is intentional since the individuals who experience the magical chaos in the forest wake up to believe that it was all a dream, so the ending is a way to ‘wake’ us up essentially.

But you see, the Mechanicals are a still a part of the play, and is Shakespeare’s brilliant way of highlighting that duality of theatre – it is reality and imagination, rational and irrational. Here’s hoping we get to gather in this mad, sane space once more.

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