Shenanigans reign in this neck of the woods. Boogying back to the Bridgeafter six years, Nicholas Hytner’s rollicking production of Shakespeare’s great comedy feasts on bawdy mischief and aerial antics. Radiating charisma, Emmanuel Akwafo’s uninhibited Bottom instructs his ragtag group of am-dram players to rehearse “most obscenely and courageously”. Hytner’s production, with somewhat more rigour and expertise, takes note.
Bunny Christie’s luscious set of beds, leaves and trapdoors has us at once rising from the murky depths of the forest and floating among the clouds of sleep. Half the audience mill amid the foggy underland, skilfully shuffled by stage management, while the rest of us sit up among the fairies. The immersive setup complements the play’s shapeshifting unreality; in this world, we become another set of magical creatures lurking in the shadows.
Rules of gravity are forgotten here. Led by David Moorst’s spiky, spidery Puck, who reclaims his role from the original production, the disco-ready fairies barely touch the ground, gambolling instead across bedframes and dangling effortlessly from loops of aerial silks. Their astonishing acrobatics have echoes of the1970 Peter Brook productionof this play, albeit with more brazenly bisexual energy, which sweeps over the show like confetti. In the lovers’ clamorous scene of misunderstandings, Puck amuses himself by floating above them, swivelling the direction of their affections like spinning tops.
One of the production’s greatest feats is switching the dialogue of fairy royalty Oberon (JJ Feild) and Titania (Susannah Fielding), which puts the power firmly in Titania’s hands. With the two actors doubling up as Theseus and Hippolyta, their motivations and memories are folded into one another, so that Hippolyta’s simmering rage at Theseus’s entrapment of her feeds Titania’s vengeful actions towards Oberon. The gender-flipping also gifts us Oberon’s riotous seduction of Bottom, a scene so joyful the whole audience seems drunk on delight.
The cast are comedy gold, their ad-libs winking to the crowd, though we could do without the distraction of the looser modern soundbites. Unlike in the 2019 run, the party doesn’t carry on beyond the show, but the production itself is enough. When all the characters are awake and the evening’s events seem distant, memories of what they did and who they kissed flicker through them. Even when dawn breaks, the night of giddy revels remains.
At theBridge theatre, London, until 20 August