Latest news with #DavidMoorst
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
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 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 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.
Telegraph
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
This is still the finest A Midsummer Night's Dream I have ever seen
Back in 2019, I gave five stars to Nicholas Hytner's 'immersive' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. His achievement was to take Shakespeare's over-familiar comedy of romantic confusion – in which young lovers and bumbling am-dram actors come unstuck in the Athenian forest - and make it fun, funny, beautiful, revelatory and, yes, sexy. His master-stroke: magicking the action amid, and above, standing spectators (the rest seated), employing daring circusy high jinks. The success here is to make a proven delight – the finest Dream I've seen – stir wonder again; even if you're re-encountering the show, it still seems fresh and strange, a shared reverie you never want to end. That's down to the fact that like much of the audience, the superb cast – mainly new but with some old faces (among them David Moorst as the anarchic sprite Puck) – are kept on their toes throughout. The space works like some hallucinogenic kaleidoscope; locations emerge through the floor and then, in the twinkling of an eye, submerge. Some of the actors are more like stunt-artists than others – Moorst bursting up through, and down into, a mattress, say, or sardonically delivering his lines upside down; the fairies flying and tumbling overhead on sheet ropes. But all must rise to the occasion of split-second timing. Wit and lyricism run in tandem with physical prowess. Whether it be an insightful emphasis or a giggle-making ad-lib – not a moment of the evening is slack. Hytner's canny re-framing of the action remains intact. Amid a pre-show display of devout ritual reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale, we first see the captured Amazonian queen Hippolyta in a glass cabinet, like an exhibit (Susannah Fielding static, defiant and compelling). Her enforced impending marriage to her captor, Theseus, makes her sympathetic towards young Hermia (Nina Cassells), overruled in love by her father – and it's as if she casts a corrective spell over the court. Theseus becomes Oberon as he tosses and turns at night (Bunny Christie's design maximising the use of beds as woody dens and play-pens). Thereafter, as Hippolyta becomes Titania, queen of the fairies, she acquires vengeful agency in a flip of the usual scenario; it's Oberon (not she) who falls, nectar-tainted, for the ass-translated Bottom. The genius of this device is that it turns a planned humiliation into a 'queer' celebration, Emmanuel Akwafo's gloriously funny Bottom and JJ Feild's rippling Oberon are camply trundled round the auditorium in their boudoir to the pumping strains of Beyoncé's Love on Top. At the same time, the play's core question about who we desire, and why, and how that shapes us – is brought exhilaratingly to the fore, in all its complexity and confusion. There's much more, ravingly, to say but let's stick with this: perfect.
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Midsummer Night's Dream review – Nicholas Hytner's revels return with bawdy, uninhibited mischief
Shenanigans reign in this neck of the woods. Boogying back to the Bridge after 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 the 1970 Peter Brook production of 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 the Bridge theatre, London, until 20 August
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Re-met by moonlight: A Midsummer Night's Dream returns to London's Bridge theatre
Hanging around during rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian Felicity Montagu, centre, plays Quince Emmanuel Akwafo (Bottom), David Moorst (Puck) and Dominic Semwanga (Flute) in rehearsals David Moorst with Susannah Fielding in the production, designed by Bunny Christie A Midsummer Night's Dream is an immersive production with some audience members up close and personal Emmanuel Akwafo, right, with JJ Feild, who doubles as Oberon and Theseus A Midsummer Night's Dream has movement direction by Arlene Phillips David Moorst (Puck), top, Divesh Subaskaran (Lysander) and Paul Adeyefa (Demetrius) There is co-direction and co-movement direction by James Cousins The costumes are designed by Christina Cunningham, with additional outfits by Bunny Christie Susannah Fielding and JJ Feild A Midsummer Night's Dream has lighting by Bruno Poet The composer is Grant Olding, with sound design by Paul Arditti Emmanuel Akwafo (Bottom) and Hilson Agbangbe (Starveling) in the production, with fight direction by Kate Waters The hair and make-up designer is Susanna Peretz A Midsummer Night's Dream is at the Bridge theatre, London, until 20 August
