Antic Disposition celebrate 15th anniversary
with A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Gray’s Inn Hall, South Square, London WC1R 5ET
Monday 24th August – Saturday 5th September 2020
Award-winning site-specific theatre company Antic Disposition celebrate their fifteenth anniversary this summer with a restaging of one of their most popular productions, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in London’s historic Gray’s Inn Hall.
Renowned for their innovative staging of classic plays in unconventional spaces, Antic Disposition will bring Shakespeare’s quintessential comedy to life in a riot of madcap comedy, lyrical poetry, evocative music and visual spectacle, creating an enchanting experience for the whole family
A stone’s throw from Holborn and Chancery Lane, the sixteenth-century, wood-paneled Gray’s Inn Hall is one of the few remaining original Shakespearean venues, having hosted the first recorded performance of The Comedy of Errors in 1594. A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents a rare opportunity to visit and explore one of London’s hidden architectural treasures.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is directed by Antic Disposition artistic directors Ben Horslen and John Risebero, who together founded the Peter Brook Award-winning company in 2005. Their recent joint directorial credits include Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in Temple Church; The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing in Gray’s Inn Hall; Henry V, which toured twenty of the UK’s finest cathedrals marking the centenary of the First World War and Shakespeare400; and their own musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which has enjoyed five sell-out seasons in the spectacular Middle Temple Hall.
Directors Horslen and Risebero comment, As a company steeped in site-specific theatre, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate Antic Disposition’s fifteenth anniversary than by reviving this most popular of plays in an original Shakespearean venue, Gray’s Inn Hall. In Elizabethan days, annual student revels turned the normally respectable Inns of Court into places of laughter and merriment. Our high-energy production will do the same, unleashing the bohemian magic of the woods into the conventional corridors of the legal quarter.
Before arriving in London, A Midsummer Night’s Dream will tour twelve extraordinary open-air locations around the Dordogne and Lot valleys in southwest France from 29 July to 12 August – Antic Disposition’s 16th annual tour of the region.