Latest news with #MidsummerNightsDream
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.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bemidji Public Library, Lake Bemidji State Park to host make-and-take card event
Jun. 13—BEMIDJI — The Bemidji Public Library and Lake Bemidji State Park will partner on a Midsummer Night's make-and-take cards event from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 21, at the library, 509 America Ave. NW. "Join Lake Bemidji State Park artists-in-residence Monica Rojas and Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns for a pop-up card and envelope making activity inspired by William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,'" a release said. All materials will be provided. Bemidji Public Library events are free and open to the public. Contact Kate Egelhof at the library with any questions at egelhofk@ or (218) 751-3963.
The Guardian
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jacob Alon: In Limerence review – dreamy story songs of myth and melancholy
The title of Scottish indie-folk musician Jacob Alon's delicate debut album may seem ironic: the phrase describes an intense kind of desire, and Alon's music can be shatteringly desolate and lonely, their voice and fingerpicked guitar conveying isolation and introversion with raw clarity. But In Limerence makes a strong case for its name: isn't desire, Alon seems to ask, one of the most incurably lonely feelings of all? These story songs – about youthful infatuation, reckless hedonism and one-sided obsession – are brittle and wounded, each zeroing in on a different strain of disappointment or heartache. Alon was born in Dunfermline, Fife, a city tucked between pockets of forest, and they play up the organic, semi-mystical nature of their music, performing in wings and Midsummer Night's Dream-esque wreaths; In Limerence's lyric sheet is filled with references to the cosmos, mythology and folklore. You can sense their fealty to Sufjan Stevens, who has also performed wearing wings and peppers his queer love songs with dense literary references. But some of Alon's choices still feel frustratingly traditional. Of Amber and I Couldn't Feed Her feature unique samples and unorthodox percussion, but the likes of Elijah and Liquid Gold 25 struggle for distinction among the ever-growing pack of folksy, post-Adrianne Lenker songwriters. Still, Alon's perspective is well-realised, making In Limerence compelling enough to keep you tuned in for whatever's next.
