MORE than four centuries after the events of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania is still here – but not as audiences remember her.
In a new one-woman show coming to The Bear Pit in Stratford, the fairy queen Titania – played by Stratfordian Nia Gwynne – has fallen into this world. She sweeps the theatre. She lives off scraps. She watches. And she has taken something she cannot easily return.
Part confessional, part spell, part stand-up, Titania pieces together what happened after Shakespeare’s ending. Oberon is gone, lost to his own undoing. Puck has slipped into the digital world and refuses to return. The forests have thinned, the seasons have faltered, and the fairy kingdom has all but disappeared.
And now Titania has crossed a line.
The play moves between mischief and mourning, myth and modernity. It explores love, loss, ecology and the fragile, dangerous instinct to protect what we cannot keep.
Set within the “nutshell world” of the theatre, this is a story about survival – of magic, of stories, and of the self – in a world that no longer knows how to believe.
At once comical, tragic and poetical, Titania invites audiences into a space where the boundaries between human and fairy, past and present, tenderness and threat, begin to blur.
Titania runs at The Bear Pit in Stratford from April 24 to April 25.
Visit www.thebearpit.org.uk/whats-on/titania/ for more details.
