Review Roundup: Nicholas Hytner's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at Bridge Theatre

Return to the forest this summer – a dream world of flying fairies, contagious fogs and moonlight revels. The seating is wrapped around the action while the immersive tickets allow the story to be followed on foot.

Following its critically-acclaimed run in 2019, the Bridge Theatre’s five-star production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns for a limited run.

What did the critics think?

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the Bridge Theatre until 20 August

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Debbie Gilpin, BroadwayWorld: Even though this is one of the most commonly staged of all Shakespeare plays, productions like this are irresistible. Hytner and his cast and creatives have found a way of bottling pure joy, and I can only advise him to keep sharing it around every few years - that would be a recurring Dream that no one could get bored of.

Kate Wyver, The Guardian: 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.

Theo Bosanquet, WhatsOnStage: The production’s final key ingredient, in common with many great Dreams, is a proper sense of spectacle, culminating in the giant balls that bounce over the audience’s heads at the end. Although it perhaps doesn’t quite reach the cathartic heights of Guys and Dolls, there’s a full-throated and infectious sense of collective fun to proceedings that ensures we all take Puck’s proffered hand of friendship as we dance out into the night. Those shadows can wait for another day.

Nick Curtis, The Standard: Bottom and his fellow artisans, rehearsing a dreadful play for Theseus’s wedding, are treated with more dignity and delicacy than is usual. The whole cast is allowed a measure of ad lib or embellishment, as in Shakespeare’s day. This is a gift to Akwafo, who is funny down to his bones, but also to the drily acerbic Fielding and to Moorst, who has further honed his interaction with audience members since he played Puck in 2019.

Julia Rank, London Theatre: The production loses some momentum in the scenes with the lovers, who are pleasant but largely two-dimensional. But the Rude Mechanicals, led by Felicity Montagu’s Mistress Quince as a long-suffering adult education facilitator, present a truly uproarious staging of Pyramus and Thisbe that’s also touching in its dedication to teamwork, however chaotic. Emmanuel Akwafo is charming as Bottom, dressed in a yellow boilersuit, who is both innocent and deeply serious about his art (“It’s in the round!” he hisses at the Wall). It’s a play in which the whimsical and the serious intertwine and joy prevails. Topped off with a finale filled with a group dance and giant moon-like beach balls floating over the pit, it’s the best party of the summer.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: 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.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: So we feel in good, unsafe hands with (a returning) David Moorst as a leather-clad, angular Puck who swings over the action as if he has spent half his life in midair. The young lovers get the right blend of the spirited and the naive, Lily Simpkiss’s lovestruck Helena especially. Felicity Montagu brings her sure comic touch to the school-teacherish Quince. Her am-dram rude mechanicals throw a lot of comic ideas at the wall to see what sticks: some don’t, plenty do.

Average Rating: 88.6%