First Night Swirling around the audience, this Dream is feverish, erotic fun

Nicholas Hytner’s acrobatic, erotic, playfully queered version of Shakespeare’s Dream seems even more delightful now than it was in 2019. It’s a fully immersive show, with audience members in the Bridge's hi-tech pit (there are seats too) swirling around action at ground level and on raised rostra but also gazing up at bodies twisting and flexing in silk slings up in the air. It’s beautifully staged and acted, thought provoking, technically brilliant, and ends up with a party. Seriously, what's not to like?

- NICK CURTIS CHIEF THEATRE CRITIC

Here, Shakespeare's Athens is a place of monochrome, orthodox conformity, while the nocturnal fairy forest to which everyone escapes is a subconscious world built out of vine-twined beds, where deepest fears and darkest fantasies can be played out. In the city, Susannah Fielding’s Hippolyta is confined to a glass cage while a headscarfed choir hymns her impending nuptials to Theseus (a languid JJ Feild).

In the multicoloured dreamland of fabulously flexible fairies, it’s her imperious queen Titania who drugs his king Oberon into sleeping with a human commoner transformed into a donkey, rather than vice versa. A hugely useful corrective, particularly given that Emmanuel Akwafo's sweet-natured Bottom, the aforementioned ass, seems instantly into it.