Titania - An hour fifteen with the fairy queen

5 minutes ago
2 min read

Nia Gwynne as Titania. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Titania – A new one-woman show by D R Hood. Performed by Nia Gwynne at The Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 24 – 25 April. Other dates and venues: 8 May: The Tolmen Centre, Constantine, Cornwall; 25 June: The Lyric Theatre, Bridport, Dorset. Running time: Approximately 1 hour 15 minutes (no interval).

Preview

Do you still believe in fairies?

More than four centuries after the events of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania is still here. But things have changed. Four hundred years after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania remains - but not as you remember her. In this striking new one-woman show, the fairy queen Titania (Nia Gwynne, Pride, Darkest Hour, King Lear, Titus Andronicus) has fallen into our 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. What does it mean to care for something - and when must you let it go?

Nia Gwynne. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Nia Gwynne trained at RADA and has worked extensively in theatre, film and television. Her theatre credits include Goneril in King Lear, Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV, all for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Film and TV credits include the BAFTA winning films Pride and Darkest Hour and for TV The Long Call and The Jury.

Dictynna Hood’s feature films as writer-director include: Us Among the Stones with Anna Calder-Marshall; Wreckers with Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch. Dictynna has also written and directed award-winning short films The Other Man and Journey Man and (as writer) animation film Through the Hawthorn. Writing for theatre includes The Selkie, a theatre piece commissioned by the Wellcome Foundation, and musical-in-development Dr Faustess, about a doctor who calls up the devil.