A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bridge Theatre: Revisiting Oberon and Bottom's summer romance with Hammed Animashaun and Oliver Chris

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Most theatre lovers will admit with a heavy heart that, brilliant as it is to have them, watching theatre productions online can never match up to really being there. But some of the exuberance of the Bridge Theatre’s immersive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , broadcast for free tonight, may just burst through the screen. It’s certainly tangible on the phone when I speak to its stars, Hammed Animashaun and Oliver Chris, who stole the show with a little help from Beyoncé (more on that later).

Staged last summer, Nick Hytner’s production turned the Bridge’s pit area into a magical forest, with acrobats swinging over the audience and beds rising out of the floor. Switching the roles of Oberon and Titania (played with regal style by Gwendoline Christie) meant that the fairy king fell in love with Bottom and had the best night of his life while the queen ran the show.

“We’ve got this play, which runs the risk of being done to death you know, you hear Midsummer Night’s Dream and everyone’s eyes sort of roll back in their heads,” says Chris, whose previous roles include Prince William in King Charles III to wind-up merchant Boyce in Green Wing. “But putting it in this setting with Nick’s structural changes, the whole thing just kind of popped into life. What it becomes is this injection of joy in the world.”

Animashaun, who has also starred in Barber Shop Chronicles and Master Harold... and the Boys at the National Theatre and will appear in the big-screen adaptation of Caitlin Moran's novel How to Build a Girl, describes it as the best time he’s ever had in the rehearsal room and says the cast still talk almost every day. “I don’t even remember a bad day during the whole process,” he chuckles.

Manuel Harlan

This pure enjoyment rippled through to audiences; Chris compares its impact to One Man Two Guvnors, another show he worked on with Hytner back in 2011, which became the first National Theatre Live to be streamed during lockdown in May. He remembers people stopping him in the street or coming up to him in Sainsbury’s asking him about the show. “That doesn’t really happen for plays,” he says. “To be in the middle of that, standing among 1000 people, delivering some of the most beautiful lines of Shakespeare is about as good as it gets.”

Hytner’s changes made one of Shakespeare’s more off-the-wall plots make more sense to a modern audience. Away went the sinister undercurrent of coercion and manipulation your heart always goes out to Helena in particular and in came a sense of liberation and living for the present. “It unlocks the play and increases the innocence, and it takes away that slightly vindictive, masculine patriarchal agenda,” says Chris. “It becomes like an allegory: Oberon is the dream version of Theseus. He’s a proud king and his mind is forced to be opened by Titania’s actions in making him fall in love with this creature who would normally disgust him.

“The beginning of the play is purposely very Handmaid’s Tale. Theseus is this really oppressive, ultra-religious man. And then he and Oberon go into this dream world, in which Theseus learns that maybe you shouldn't be quite so prescriptive over who you demand to love who, and then everyone can chill out and have a great time be in love with whoever they want.”

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Animashaun’s performance as Bottom “who just lives in the moment and wants to do and try everything,” he says won him mountains of praise, including the Critic’s Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance earlier this year. In his version, Bottom is not a vain luvvie who wants the best part in the Mechanicals’ play, but someone who just loves life. “There’s nothing crazy about a fairy who’s telling him that he loves him. He’s like, ‘alright, I’m not surprised’.”

It’s a role he’s always wanted to play, and the reaction has been “really humbling and overwhelming”. He always had an idea of how he would play the role and says Hytner just let him go for it. “I was just having the time of my life and I was waiting for Nick to see a show and say ‘Hammed, you need to tone it down because you’re doing a bit too much’ but he never did,” he says with a big laugh.

Much like Oberon and Bottom themselves, when the night they fall in love arrives, the audience just has to go with it literally. The pair were wheeled around the pit on a four-poster bed dancing to Beyoncé and which the crowd has no choice but to follow. “It was really funny because people were following the bed and Beyoncé’s playing and everyone’s going crazy. But we were very close to the audience who were sitting as well, and there’d be the occasional very po-faced person sitting there, just refusing, arms folded, wondering what on earth we’d done to Shakespeare’s greatest comedy! Two boys cavorting around on a bed, stroking each others ears... it was so funny! I used to focus on those people more than anyone,” Chris says, descending into mischievous giggles.

Audiences also loved the moment when Bottom asks for “a calendar”, turning to the audience, taking someone’s smartphone and taking a selfie with the other mechanicals. In fact, they loved it so much that the cast came up with “an algorithm” so people wouldn’t deliberately stand in the same spot. “We hoped people would come back two or three times we never thought people will be coming back like ten or eleven times,” says Animashaun. “So we tried to figure out a method to not go to the same place every time, because we realised during the show if I go to the same place every time, there’d be 12 people putting their phones up.” Still, though, people “clocked it from the beginning” resulting in a Twitter thread where people tried to come up with a formula to end up in the right spot. “I was like, woah. This is crazy.”

There may have been something in the air last summer A Midsummer Night’s Dream had three different productions at once. (The others were at the Globe and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.) “I feel like I’ve been living in 2020 for about 20 years, sometimes it’s hard to think back to what it was like in 2019. It was Brexit, wasn’t it? Everyone was tired, and I think people just needed a laugh,” says Animashaun. “I think there’s something about A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I don’t mean this in any disrespect, but like, I always thought Shakespeare probably wrote it when he’d had too much to drink, because if you read it it doesn’t make much sense.”

I ask Chris what he made of a debate earlier this year as to whether Shakespeare has been taken over by the ‘woke brigade’. To say he has little time for the argument is putting it lightly.

“I don’t get it! This play was performed three times in the same summer and you’re telling me that there’s not room for those three productions to be different and experimental? Frankly, it’s just stupidity,” he says, adding that we can use Shakespeare to have vital conversations about race and gender. Animashaun’s view is that people are entitled to their opinion but “I’m a strong believer in interpretation is everything.”

“Why would you want to see the same thing with the weird shorts and tights and fluffy collars and stuff like that?” he adds. “It’s not really about that. It’s about the interpretation of what you think when you read a particular piece of work.” Once the pandemic is over, he says, “people want to see radical things that’s what makes theatre exciting.”

Manuel Harlan

Animashaun and Chris have been regulars in the NT Live broadcasts (“It’s distilled nine years of my career into three months it makes me look terribly successful,” says Chris), but both sound desperate to get back on stage. When theatres closed down, Chris was two weeks into rehearsals for Jack Absolute Flies Again, a show he co-wrote with Richard Bean for the National Theatre’s Olivier stage. His faith in theatregoers returning to venues is clear: “I think if people weren't scared they’re going to die, there’d be stampedes.”

He hopes the show’s postponement is a hiatus rather than a cancellation. Like anyone you speak to in theatre, he’s quick to say there are bigger problems, and makes light of his own personal fortunes. “I wait 40 years to write a play and I managed to time it with a global pandemic and the once-in-a-f***ng-civilisation closing down of the theatres. They say the art of good comedy is in the timing. I’ve certainly nailed that.” But he’s disappointed for the cast who haven’t been able to perform the play. “That will be the thing that’s tragic if these actors don’t get the opportunity to show off because they were so brilliant, and if I were the only person who saw it.”

Animashaun, who was filming in Prague when the world started to go into lockdown, is adamant that theatre cannot be allowed to fall by the wayside. “It’s painful right now to see what theatres are going through, when you hear West End theatres closing for the rest of the year, friends of mine not being able to work,” he says. “It’s been a difficult time, but I have to stay positive because it’s our livelihoods. So I can’t afford to be pessimistic about this. I have to be optimistic. I have to be.”

A Midsummer Night's Dream will be streamed for free on the National Theatre’s YouTube channel tonight (June 25) from 7pm and be available on demand for seven days. Donations are welcomed to support both theatres while they remain closed

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