Russell T Davies adds lesbian kiss to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Russell T Davies has adapted Midsummer Night’s Dream to incorporate a lesbian kiss.

The former Queer as Folk showrunner is known for bringing an LGBT angle to projects, from his Channel 4 show Cucumber to his previous work on Doctor Who and Torchwood.

However, he’s now set his sights on Shakespeare.

Within his interpretation of the Shakespearean comedy into a BBC TV movie, Mr Davies has introduced an intimate kiss between Titania and Hippolyta during the last scenes of the film.

Mr. Davies told PA: “I wanted to have a man with a man, a man who was dressed as a woman with a man, and a woman with a woman because it’s 2016, so that’s the world now.”

“I wanted children to watch this and see the real world in the middle of this fantasy.”

The film will star Maxine Peake as lovelorn fairy queen Titania, John Hannah as King Theseus and Matt Lucas as Bottom.

In relation to his reinterpretation he said: “There’s something sacred about when you sit down at a computer and you’re looking at words that have been sat there for 400 years, and I did genuinely feel strange. But you’ve just got to do it.”

It appears that this generation is doing it with some added lesbian drama.

His adaptations of the comedy, Davies claims are part of the natural progression of how “plays reinvent themselves constantly, every generation does them differently.”

Last year Davies said during a Telegraph interview that: “There is not enough male frontal nudity on TV… You’re far more likely to see a naked woman than a naked man. It’s only [seen as] rude because the rest of television is rather tame – it doesn’t actually talk about sex and our bodies and how we feel about them. I’m not out to shock.”

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