New production of Midsummer Night's Dream among the most enteraining Shakespeare production

Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre (London) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has to go down as one of the most entertaining, exciting, and imaginative productions of this play, in fact of any Shakespeare comedy, in decades (it’s only obvious point of comparison is the famous Peter Brook production). The Hytner/Bridge show, staged in what looks like a sports arena and performed on a set of highly mobile mini-stages (each the size of a boxing ring perhaps?) and marked by amazing acrobatics – Puck really does seem to live aloft – much like Cirque de Soleil meets Shakespeare. The ensemble cast, with some doubling roles, not only manages the sometimes complex dialog and staging – these are the typically well-versed in classics British actors – but also manages some rocking musical #s and some beautiful and complex dance moves as well. It’s obvious throughout that the audience – some of whom are drawn into the production in surprising ways  - is having a great time (I saw the production on YouTube, a two-day run – not sure if or when it will be available again on film/streaming), and the actors as well. You could not help but be caught up in this performance (which reminded M and me of a London production of a Mystery Play that we saw many years ago that drew the entire audience into the show, as if we were in a medieval village). But there’s more to the show than the pyrotechnics, acrobatics, poetics, slapstick humor, and the occasional anachronism, which always draws a laugh; Hytner has re-imagined (and re-assigned) some of the key plot elements to give the play a contemporary view of sexual desire; the show is not just about two couples gone awry but about a # of possible sexual match-ups happening in the woods outside of Athens (that is to say, anywhere). Hard to single out any one actor for special praise, but Hammed Animashaun plays Bottom for all he’s worth and David Moorst is an astonishingly agile Puck.

A fun and funny and inventive contemporary-setting film of Midsummer Night's Dream

I would not suggest that your first exposure to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream be the highly inventing, contemporary-setting take by writer-director Casey Wilder Mott (2018) as her version is so eccentric and unusual and fast-paced as to lose many viewere unfamiliar w/ at lest the basics of the plot - but that said this film is as much fun and as inventive or at least as clever as just about any Shakespeare-on-film project I've ever seen. CWM takes great liberty w/ the plot - many cuts and excisions, some shifting of chronology - but that said she also gets at the spirit of the play, the frenzy and confusion and the strangeness of desire, including the "narcissism of small differences." She keeps the Athens setting but in name only, shifting Athens to Los Angeles, with Duke Theseus a super-agent or studio mogul and his wife-to-be, Hippolyta, a pencil-thin eye candy beauty who has I think 2 lines in the whole film. Of the forest spirits, Puck is a Malibu surfer dude - and we learn of him, in a clever closing sequence (spoiler here) that he's in a sense the writer-director of the movie we're watching; Oberon-Titania, the "fairies, are, as it turns out, the sound machine hired to entertain at the Duke's wedding. The 4 young lovers, whom every reader (and viewer) confuses, which is of course the intention, are contemporary LA industry types; their romps through the forest under various spells play out well, w/ Lily Rabe as Helena ddoing a particularly powerful rant. The highlight , probably, is the Pyramus and Thisby crew, which CWM brilliantly sets up as an AFI (Athens Film Institute) student production, leading to a hilarious "for your consideration" disc that they present to the Duke for a post-wedding screening (His "get her name" to one of his assistants, halfway through the hilariously bad video, is great); special props on this plot thread to Charity Wakefield as Quince, the director. Thought this MSD is by no means definitive, it's as much fun as just about any production of a Sh comedy as I've seen on film