A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Bridge Theatre, London Until August 31, 2hrs 40mins
If the Glastonbury festival ever staged a Shakespeare, it might look like this. It’s from the same creative team that did last year’s hit ‘immersive’ version of Julius Caesar, and you can follow the actors around on foot or watch from a seat on the sides.
Metal beds rise from the floor and the fairy sprites are largely overhead, like aerialists-cum-pole dancers. The choreography, by the veteran Arlene Phillips, bops to a play-list that includes Beyoncé and Jimmy Cliff.
Director Nicholas Hytner has grievously altered the text so that the two actors playing Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta speak each other’s lines. Thus Titania – Gwendoline Christie from Game Of Thrones – gets to watch Oberon (Oliver Chris) falling in love with Bottom (a lunky, sweet Hammed Animashaun), who’s sprouted ass’s ears.
They have a gay donkey bubble bath together.
Titania – Gwendoline Christie from Game Of Thrones – gets to watch Oberon (Oliver Chris) falling in love with Bottom (a lunky, sweet Hammed Animashaun), who’s sprouted ass’s ears
Isis Hainsworth and Tessa Bonham Jones are well cast as Hermia and Helena, the mortals manipulated by David Moorst’s camp, snarky, ultra-acrobatic Puck.
But what are we watching? This poor play takes such a knocking that its poetry, warmth and humanity have evaporated. Even the normally failsafe ‘rude mechanicals’ (Peter Quince is now Mistress Quince) are oddly unendearing in the incomprehensibly staged play-within-a-play.
Isis Hainsworth (above with Christie and Chris) and Tessa Bonham Jones are well cast as Hermia and Helena, the mortals manipulated by David Moorst’s camp, snarky Puck
This deeply fashionable show comes with a live gig feel, cheap laughs and loads of ad-libbing. ‘It’s immersive theatre, don’t mess with it,’ says one of the cast. But it’s such a skin-deep evening.
Samuel Pepys called this golden comedy ‘the most insipid, ridiculous play I ever saw’. Watching this, I began to think he had a point.
Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds
56 Leadenhall Street, London Until August 31, 1hr 50mins
Rating: 
Lovers of Jeff Wayne’s iconic 1978 concept album – based on H G Wells’s novel – can now try this ‘immersive experience’. Instead of just listening to the story of the Martian invasion, you have to survive it.
Small groups are ushered by actors through Edwardian rooms, streets and open heathland. Virtual-reality headsets recreate a Surrey overtaken by bug-eyed Martian tripod machines.
There’s a virtual boat trip though red-leaved trees – cue Forever Autumn, the big hit off the album – and into the open sea via London.
Small groups are ushered by actors through Edwardian rooms, streets and open heathland. Virtual-reality headsets recreate a Surrey overtaken by bug-eyed Martian tripod machines
Martian tripods lumber hundreds of feet overhead. I instinctively ducked as a chunk of an exploding Big Ben flew past.
Expect to experience Wellsian utopia, religious panic, a Martian ship’s bowels and simulated flight.
The show’s whole steampunk conception works well. With the headset on, it feels almost overwhelming, all of it enhanced by Wayne’s surging music, with its spacey ethereality.
A total must-see for thrill-seekers and fans of the album.
Driving Miss Daisy
York Theatre Royal Until June 29, 1hr 45mins
Rating: 
Alfred Uhry’s 1987 play about a black man who becomes the chauffeur for a testy, reluctant 72-year-old white Jewish woman in Atlanta, Georgia, won a Pulitzer prize, and a movie Oscar.
Suzann McLean’s production reminds you why it’s a classic, while never getting fully into gear.
The play shows the pair’s tender relationship over 25 years, from 1948 to 1973, Daisy’s frostiness thawing in the face of Hoke’s enduring good humour – although throughout there are potent moments of unconscious, unrecognised prejudice.
Paula Wilcox as Daisy – though moving in the final scenes – is perhaps hampered by the accent, remaining rather shrilly one-note
Emma Wee’s design splashes headlines and news footage across the walls of a sloping, outsized front room, a helpful if heavy-handed way of reminding us of the changing times.
The play shows its own age, however. The character of Hoke now feels like a tired trope: Hollywood’s patient, good-hearted ‘magical negro’, happy to serve. But Maurey Richards is terrific in the part: swooping and swerving around a southern accent, he finds all its gentle, mischievous humour.
The character of Hoke now feels like a tired trope. But Maurey Richards is terrific in the part: swooping and swerving around a southern accent, he finds all its gentle, mischievous humour
Paula Wilcox as Daisy – though moving in the final scenes – is perhaps hampered by the accent, remaining rather shrilly one-note. She does a fine line in pouting froideur and sardonic complaints but rarely taps into the subtext.
McLean’s direction needs to pick up the pace and also to find those key moments of emotional change; this Driving Miss Daisy is wistful, but doesn’t quite deliver that punch to the gut.
Holly Williams