Writer and Director: Dictynna Hood
Titania is a glorious monologue devised by filmmaker Dictynna Hood for RSC actor Nia Gwynne. Hood surprises us with her imagined afterlife of the fairy queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gwynne certainly doesn’t look like a fairy when she appears sweeping the floor of an empty theatre. Seeing us, she startles – ‘you’re there!’ she says, and part of the show’s magic is her constant awareness of us as her audience. For Titania indeed is magical.
Somehow with minimal props and costumes Gwynne convinces us that she is indeed an otherworldly creature. Her performance is mesmerising: she moves with balletic grace, at one moment all mischief, then suddenly poised, alert to supernatural forces.
And there’s extraordinary imaginative freedom to Hood’s writing. What might seem anachronisms work here. Puck may be trapped in the world of the mobile phone, a changeling child snatched from a supermarket, but we’re beginning to glimpse how time moves at a different pace in the fairy world. When the Donkey Man – for Titania has rejected Oberon in favour of sexy Bottom – yearns to return to his human life, he is shocked to find his old mucker Snout a white-bearded elder, sucking on a long clay pipe.
Shakespeare is never mentioned by name: he’s just ‘the ghost writer.’ His imaginative ideas, in Dictynna’s telling, are all secondhand, evidently snatched from Titania’s poetic world. Hers is a world that teems with lyrical language, her reference to ‘the nutshell world’ reminding us that Titania is also the Queen Mab of Mercutio’s dream. Modern fairy tales are robbed of such nuance – Gywnne briefly impersonates a shallow Cinderella, talking the empty talk of TikTok influencers.
At the Old Red Lion for the Camden Fringe, Cian Feasey creates the effectively simple sound and lighting originally designed by Dwayne Dawson – the fairy Cobweb, for example, just the sound of a trapped moth, a flicker of mirrored light.
In Shakespeare’s play, it is the row between Titania and Oberon that has created unseasonal bad weather. Now Titania punishes us for destroying her woodland haunts, sending punishing droughts and fires. But there is hope too in the future she chooses for her latest changeling child.
Titania is a masterpiece of writing and performance.
Runs until 11 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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10
