A Midsummer Night's Dream for autistic people

"This show, created in 2017 was the second fully adapted production I made for autistic individuals using the Hunter Heartbeat games that I had first created during 2003-2006. The show was a collaboration between Flute Theatre and the Orange Tree Theatre in 2017 and went on to perform at the Orange Tree again in 2018 as well as the Bridge Theatre in 2018 and 2019, Chichester Festival Theatre, St John’s College Brighton and The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, Kansas MO. Whilst performing The Tempest in Barcelona in Spring 2017, Anna, an autistic girl, had asked us “to make her a hugging game next time we came to see her”. Later that same year, I was creating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we made Anna her hugging game insprired by Bottom’s instruction to the fairy Cobweb: “Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag”. One actor plays the bee whilst the other plays Cobweb who wraps the bee in her thread and squeezes her to death “with love’. This game became a firm favourite with children and Anna still loves it to this day. The production was also the basis for Flute’s “Deconstructing the Dream” in 2019, a collaboration of science and art that included the first ever live brain imaging of an actor onstage. The actor played Bottom whilst the neuroscientists, who were onstage simultaneously recording the data from the actor – which was being relayed on a huge brain projected on a screen - played the fairies. We have revived the production in 2024 to perform alongside our new mainstage production of A Midsummer NIght's Dream. In Spring 2024 we performed the show in Romanian with our families from ANCAAR in Craiova and at Riverside Studios London and Brunswick Theatre Brighton with our UK families."