My Shakespeare

Episode
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Broadcast Info
2014 (45 mins)
Description
Hugh Bonneville started his career as an understudy for Ralph Fiennes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park. He revisits the theatre where his love for Shakespeare blossomed and catches up with Ralph to talk about why the play has enduring appeal. Interviews include David Walliams and Sheridan Smith.
It’s a play full of magic, mayhem, sex, drugs and donkeys!
Hugh started his career at the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park, understudying Ralph Fiennes as Lysander (one of the four lovers) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He and Ralph meet up again in the shadow of that theatre to try and untangle the extraordinary and complicated plot of one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular plays. On one level it’s a simple romantic comedy – but it starts with all the potential to be a great tragedy. Lysande’s love for Hermia may well cause he to lose her life!
Hugh goes to see the play & on Midsummer’s Night at the Globe Theatre and talks to the director about the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy and also between the natural and the supernatural. We tell the story that it might have been performed as part of a wedding celebration and the Globe Actors try out scenes not far from where it might first have been performed.

Hugh meets up with the comic actor David Walliams who was just taking on the major role of Bottom in another new production. But he also looks back at the great gangster actor James Cagney and his performance in the same role in 1935! Bottom is one of a group of workmen mechanicals who are also major characters in this story of love and magic

Hugh discovers references in the play to a great and scandalous love story involving Queen Elizabeth and at the same time uncovers some of the technical writing tools that Shakespeare used to weave this magical plot.

The Dream is a great romantic comedy and in some ways, as we discover, it’s Shakespeare deliberately taking the mickey out of his own great romantic tragedy Romeo & Juliet. The play’s final scene in which Bottom and his work mates perform a dreadfully bad version of that tragic story for the aristocratic Court of the local Duke is one of the most well known and popular scenes in all of Shakespeare.

In the deserted and almost haunted Globe Theatre after having seen the latest production - and after all the audience have left, Hugh muses on the pla’s enduring appeal
Genre
Literature; Writing

How to cite this record

The Open University, "My Shakespeare". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/85998 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)