A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Bridge Theatre London

THE BAD news is that, as with Brexit, responses to production will fall into two bitterly divided camps. The good, though, is that unlike with those negotiations, this tale of desperate lovers is thrillingly theatrical and worth anyone’s time.

Not only does Nicholas Hytner have a ball, he invites all to join in the unconstrained hedonism of a last blow-out party on the edge of doom. It’s a welcome antidote to the current world at large.

Just as with Hytner’s earlier Julius Caesar at the Bridge, this is a promenade performance where half the audience stand. And the action is everywhere — from high-wire acts, soaring glass booths and ivy-laden brass beds to floating moon balls, glamorous fairies and a gravity-defying Puck.

What begins as dark, puritanical and love-free bursts into bacchanalian anarchy — a sex fest where wildly reckless and exuberant gay passion drives the drama.

Oberon and Titania swap lines so that it is Oberon who falls for Bottom. Lysander and Demetrius, as well as Helena and Hermia, seem keener on snogging each other than the opposite sex.

Puck is a delinquent who mesmerises with his acrobatic feats and demonic interventions. And the rude mechanicals are gender-fluid. It’s a gas.

Bunny Christie’s design is towering in its imagination, while Arlene Phillips and Lennin Nelson-McClure combine to choreograph movement, dance and circus acrobatics together in one wild party and the music from the likes of Dizzee Rascal and Florence and the Machine conjures the magic too.

David Moorst as Puck, Oliver Chris as Theseus/Oberon and Gwendoline Christie as Hippolyta/Titania set the stage alight but it is Hammed Animashaun as Bottom who steals the show and makes it his own.  

For Shakespeare purists, this show will rankle — the lines are messed with and the poetry often lost. The familiar pastoral magic, floating from the ancient woodlands like a mist of inherited memory, is all but obliterated in this fierce and urgent homage to modern life.

If theatre is a mirror to the times, then Hytner would seem to tell us they’re apocalyptic.

Comedy, audience interaction, stunning effects and wild plotting all add up to a landmark show. But they do not define the play or drown out the essential beauty of the original, timeless  Shakespeare text.  

Runs until August 31, box office: bridgetheatre.co.uk