Britten's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM – for the first time in 60 years at the Royal Swedish Opera

Experience Shakespeare’s lilting language in dazzling operatic apparel! Two pairs of young lovers, more or less frustrated, flee into the woods to escape conventions and demands and to find their true selves. But the forest means not only freedom, fancy and dreams – but also nightmares, chaos and folly. The woods are the domain of Oberon and his queen Titania, who are in the middle of a marital crisis so serious that the whole of nature is in a state of imbalance.

Sorcery, entanglements and distorted perceptions of reality mean that everything is turned upside down for those seeking love in the woods. A forest that is more a psychological location than a physical one, in this contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s immortal comic fantasy. Together with his lifelong companion, Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten shortened Shakespeare’s text to form an operatic libretto, and wrote beautiful, dreamy music for it. Under the direction of Tobias Theorell, the merry tale is transformed into an exploration of the subconscious.