Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream(Regent's Park Open Air Theatre)

After a valiant effort by Richard II at the start of the year, A Midsummer Night's Dream has well and truly come along to replace last year's Macbethorama as 2019's most ubiquitous Shakespeare. The Bridge, Open Air Theatre and Globe are all showing off their Bottoms, and it's the second leg's turn for me as director Dominic Hill is brought in from Glasgow to Regent's Park for a new take on the play that must surely be the venue's most-performed. It's the story of Oberon, King of the Fairies (Kieran Hill) and his plan to humiliate his Queen Titania (Amber James) into giving him a changeling child of hers, with a plot involving a love potion; and the mortals who get caught up in the middle of the chaos when they wander into the woods, including a troupe of amateur actors and a quartet of starcrossed lovers.

Theatre review: Hag

I first came across stories of Baba Yaga, the bogeyman of Russian and Eastern European fairytales, during a university project on storytelling theatre; she also crops up in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but otherwise isn't hugely known in the West. She's an interesting variation on the fairytale witch in the woods who's always interested me, so a show coming to Soho that purports to tell her side of the story seemed worth a punt. Hannah Mulder's Hag makes passing reference to the famous house on chicken legs, but the main characteristic of the witch it looks at is her taste for human flesh, particularly children's. Baba Yaga (Laura Cairns) greets us in her home decorated with the skulls of victims, some of whose ghosts she's also kept around to serve her. But the story she wants to tell us is one she believes paints her in a better light than we might have heard about her.