Midsummer Joy

at the Bridge Theatre

Not long ago, we were looking at the sixteenth century paintings in the dining room at Hatfield House, seat of the Marquesses of Salisbury.

On either side of one of the extraordinary portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, there are bucolic scenes , one of which depicts Bermondsey folk revelling at a country fair. A Fete at Bermondsey by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, possibly the oldest depiction of landscape in English art. Behind them, is the Thames, and on the Middlesex side of the river, beyond, is glimpsed the Tower of London.

We were close to this very spot a few days later, now an extraordinary complex of modern buildings, called One Tower Bridge - shops, restaurants, blocks of flats, by no means all ugly. In the midst of it all is the Bridge Theatre, and we went to Nicholas Hytner’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His interpretation of the great play is about as far removed from the Elizabethan world, as One Tower Bridge is removed from Marcus Gheeraerts’s unwrecked Bermondsey. Yet,