A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare

  In 1853 Samuel Phelps staged a highly successful production at Sadler's Wells, in which he played Bottom. Three years later, Charles Kean's revival at the Princess's was equally successful--the nine-year-old Ellen Terry played Robin, an experience recalled in her autobiography.8 Augustin Daly's three American productions (1873, 1888, 1895-96) were lavish and spectacularly staged, with a ballet of fifty children in Act 3. Beerbohm Tree's productions were even more extravagant, but no less popular with audiences and critics alike: "No scene has ever been put upon the stage more beautiful than the wood near Athens in which the fairies revel and the lovers play their game of hide-and-seek."9

  The self-reflexive quality of Shakespearean drama was eliminated in all these adaptations and the conventions of Elizabethan staging regarded as limitations to be overcome. The end of the Victorian period saw the beginnings of a contemporary reaction against theatrical realism and the spectacular in favor of simpler, faster-paced productions which used all or most of Shakespeare's text on recreated Elizabethan-style stages. The most influential directors in this move were William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker. Gordon Craig also offered simplified staging of the play and a full text. Barker's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Savoy Theatre in 1914 created a critical sensation which was not wholly favorable. In his Preface to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Barker argued that the non-realism of the play, like the "greatness" of King Lear and the "scope of the action" of Antony and Cleopatra, were problematic for the scenic productions of the modern theater. He suggested producing the play on Shakespeare's own terms, with an appeal to the ear and the imagination of the audience. The structure of the play should be kept flexible. He also advocated the use of folk music and dances as opposed to the by then customary Mendelssohn score. Barker made it clear, though, that his emphasis was Shakespeare's own theme:

  1. Victorian staging with elaborate set and huge troupe of gossamer-clad fairies.

  In fine, Shakespeare has a theme, which only poetry can fully illuminate, and he trusts to poetry. Nor will he risk any conflict of interest, all the rest of his dramatist's equipment must cry small for the occasion. Wherefore we in our turn must plan the play's interpretation upon these terms. Poetry, poetry; everything to serve and nothing to compete with it!10

  Barker's production did not meet with universal approbation. Nevertheless, it was revolutionary for its time and set in train the fashion for stylized and nonnaturalistic productions. His ideas were influenced by a modernist aesthetic which rejected realism and romanticism.

  This aesthetic development found perhaps its most complete expression in Peter Brook's 1970 RSC production (discussed in detail below). In 1992, the French Canadian director Robert Lepage also offered a dark reading of the play for Britain's National Theatre, emphasizing its psychological and sexual elements. While incorporating certain aspects of Brook's version, such as the acrobatics, in other regards Lepage reacted against it. Most dramatically, Brook's celebrated white box was replaced by a mud pool. Critics at the time seem to have been confounded by this, but the hints are there in many film versions from Max Reinhardt onward which feature water, mud and pools, culminating in the mud-wrestling in Michael Hoffman's 1999 version. Hoffman, however, was probably inspired in turn by Lepage, which suggests something of the circularity of cross-media cultural influences today.

  The play's spectacular potential has recommended it to operatic composers from Purcell to Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett via Mendelssohn. Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (1946-52) was inspired by Shakespeare's play. It contains a similar combination of ordinary mortals and supernatural elements. The mortals are two pairs of lovers on the brink of marriage. The supernatural element features a temple with a priest and priestess. Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) evokes the wood, where his opera starts with discordant glissandos on the cello and a chorus of boys as fairies. Specific instruments are imagined for different groups of characters throughout, in a witty musical way. Fairies are strings, wind section, and percussion, especially the xylophone for Robin. The mechanicals are characterized by the brass section, the trombone for Bottom and, not surprisingly, the flute for Flute. The most striking characterization is the countertenor part for Oberon, which creates an eerie otherworldly effect. Titania sings a beautiful, lyrical aria to Bottom as an ass, and the encounter of Pyramus and Thisbe is written as a subtle parody of Puccini.

  The combination of Shakespeare's play and Mendelssohn's music has proved inspirational to choreographers from Petipa (1877) to George Balanchine (1962) and Frederick Ashton (1964). Balanchine created A Midsummer Night's Dream for the New York City Ballet. He was inspired principally by Mendelssohn's music and, in order to produce his first full-length ballet in America, added extra music from other works of Mendelssohn's. Ashton's The Dream is also set in the wood and focuses on the fairies and the lovers. Of the mechanicals only Bottom features as a rustic transformed by Robin who wakes Titania. Lindsay Kemp, who plays Robin in a 1994 A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Celestino Coronado, effectively turned the play into "Puck's Dream," in which the action opens and closes with him asleep wrapped in a cobweb. The production is clearly related to Reinhardt's influential 1935 film, on the one hand, and Peter Brook's staging, influenced by the Polish critic Jan Kott (see below), on the other.

  The play's mix of comedy, romance, and magic has proved irresistible to filmmakers, starting with a twelve-minute American silent version in 1909 directed by J. Stuart Blackton and Charles Kent for the Vitagraph Company of America. This was a radically simplified version of the story, shot outdoors on a windy day. There is an obvious attempt at authentic Athenian costume and presumably equally authentic fairy costume. Fairies seem to be female. Robin is a little girl and there are two other little girl fairies. Oberon has turned inexplicably into Penelope.

  Max Reinhardt's 1935 film won well-deserved Oscars for Ralph Dawson, Best Film Editing, and Hal Mohr, Best Cinematography. Mohr was never nominated but was the one and only person to win due to a popular write-in campaign. The following year the Academy changed the rules so that it couldn't happen again. The scenes in the wood with a chorus of fairies and an orchestra of elves and gnomes are brilliantly shot and directed to Mendelssohn's music, arranged by Erich Korngold. The overall effect is exhilarating and the casting full of surprises, including a very young Mickey Rooney as Robin and James Cagney as Bottom.

  Peter Hall's 1968 film, a version of his RSC stage production, shot at Compton Verney (less than ten miles from Stratford), betrays its age in the women's costumes--Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena are wearing 1960s miniskirts with long boots. The fairies are flower children and Judi Dench wears nothing except a body stocking and some strategically placed flowers. The 1992 Shakespeare: The Animated Tales: A Midsummer Night's Dream, abridged by Leon Garfield, is one of the most successful of this Russian/British collaboration in which a dozen of the most popular plays were reworked for children. Drawing and animation are excellent--incorporating expressive touches such as Titania's lips turning from green to red when she's "enamoured of an ass."

  Michael Hoffman's 1999 film is a lush romantic version in which the emphasis is on love and sex. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, the opening titles announce that "necklines were high and parents were rigid," "bustles were in decline," and that "newfangled invention, the bicycle" was on the rise. The central performance is Kevin Kline's romantic Bottom.

  The RSC, in conjunction with Film4, produced a screen version (1996) based on Adrian Noble's 1994 stage production. It reveals its debt to Peter Brook in the modernist set and bright, modern clothes. The story is mediated through the experience of a little boy. The opening shot pans around the child's bedroom and finally focuses on him asleep. In answer to the question "Whose dream is it?," the answer becomes "a child's"--a problematic device in many respects.

  Modern critical and theatrical practice responds to the play's metatheatricality, to its knowing self-awareness of life as inherently perform
ative in a way that speaks to postmodern theories relating to the loss of the real and the superabundance of simulacra. Performance styles have moved away from representations of pictorial realism to engage the audience directly. Noble's and Elijah Moshinsky's 1981 BBC television production both have Robin employ the "forbidden look": a stare straight to camera, analogous to the actor's direct address to the audience in Shakespeare's own theater. Contemporary theater has knocked down the fourth wall and is concerned to play with knowing irony on the relationship between actor, role, and audience. A Midsummer Night's Dream resonates with our cultural self-reflexivity: modernity, or rather postmodernity, responds to the play's ironic confusion of planes of reality and blurring of boundaries between the political, emotional, psychological, sexual, and spiritual. At one level the play suggests that life is complex and problematic, but things will work out. But at the margins, contained within the play's various fictions, it recognizes only too clearly that they may not.

  AT THE RSC

  The Shifting Point

  In A Midsummer Night's Dream the war amongst the fairies has resulted not only in a loss of control of elements and seasons: human beings also have become at odds with each other. It is a kind of cold war and all life as well as all nature has been set a-jangling. It seems that the mortals can find peace only when Oberon and Titania have found it. And more than this--they can find it only after being drawn into the world of Dreams back to the roots of mythology and folklore and into Oberon's domain of half-light--more revealing by far in its fantasies than the world of Reality.

  (Program note from A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1960, Old Vic, directed by Michael Langham)

  To the Elizabethans, seasonal festivals and significant calendar events like May Day, Midsummer, and Twelfth Night were not just important landmarks framing the cycle of the year, but in their celebration acted as a release valve for human behavior. The energy normally occupied in maintaining inhibition was freed for celebration. These times of misrule when social norms were turned on their head had a cathartic power, and for the young they often involved "a right of passage between generations, a means of making the transition from the old world to the new."11 The sanctioned freeing from society's usual constraints was seen as a release, but also, by contrast, as an affirmation of the rules and morals that normally guided people's lives.

  2. Production of 1959, with a suggestion of Queen Elizabeth. The kind of gentle, picturesque Dream that was reacted against in an influential essay by the Polish critic Jan Kott, which proposed a darker and far more sexually charged, even brutal, reading of the play.

  The psychological benefits of the May Day festival became key to most post-1960 productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The exploration of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, of the real world and the fairy world, turned the court of Theseus into the embodiment of society's repression and the forest of Athens into a therapeutic playground for an exploration of the self. After Jan Kott's essay "Titania and the Ass's Head" (in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published in English translation in 1964), productions of the Dream picked up on the strand of dark sexuality evident in the text. Peter Brook, whose landmark production of 1970 marked a shifting point in how directors thought about the play, pointed out that "The Dream is not a piece for the kids--it's a very powerful sexual play."12 He also commented:

  The Dream is a play about magic, spirits, fairies. Today we don't believe in any one of those things and yet, perhaps, we do. The fairy imagery which the Victorian and even post-Victorian tradition has given us in relation to the Dream has to be rejected--it has died on us. But one can't take an anti-magical, and down-to-earth view of the Dream ... the interest in working on the Dream is to take a play which is apparently composed of very artificial, unreal elements and to discover that it is a true, a real play.13

  Rejecting the "cute, gauzy, bewinged creatures"14 of the Victorian era, modern productions reinterpreted how magic was represented in the play with a variety of tricks used by weird and wonderful fairies. Attention to the whole art of theatrical illusion, in the staging, and in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, also emphasized the metatheatrical nature of the play, to a degree that had only been glanced at by productions of the early twentieth century.

  Peter Brook's 1970 production was almost without question the most influential single production of any Shakespeare play in the second half of the twentieth century. In the words of the critic Trevor R. Griffiths,

  Other directors of A Midsummer Night's Dream had already seen the need to remove various sentimental accretions, others had made the fairies a strong physical presence in the lovers' quarrels, others had seen possibilities in doubling the mortal and fairy rulers or stressing the therapeutic value of the events in the wood ... but [Brook's] triumph lay in creating a powerful crystallisation of these various elements into a unified and cohesive whole.15

  No director could avoid the influence of this staging of the Dream: "If they did not turn their backs on Brook's achievement, [they] tried somehow to get around it or to find other ways of presenting the play without going to such extremes as Brook felt compelled to do. Or they reverted to something closer to traditional 'picture-book' versions of the play."16

  3. Peter Brook's 1970 production, with white box and trapeze.

  Exploring Brook's production and those that followed, this section will examine how the treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream reflects a change in critical thinking about the play. Looking at abstract stagings, nightmarish dreams, and the more overtly sexual take on the scenes in the forest, we will see how the play has come into its own in the latter part of the twentieth century, exploring issues which previous stagings of Shakespeare's magical play had neglected.

  "All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream"17

  In 1970, the theater critic J. C. Trewin remarked that "We have met the fantasy in so many forms; over-decorated and under-decorated, as a swooningly Victorian album or as a Jacobean masque. The Wood has been a complicated forest and austere, moon-silvered thicket, or a garden in Regent's Park."18 With productions of the Dream occurring every three or four years in the RSC's repertoire, the difficulty for any director is to find new and interesting settings that will emphasize and add to the play's meaning rather than just decorate it. There is also the dilemma of trying to show a correlation between and a melding of the mortal and fairy worlds.

  The traditional wooded glade was already beginning to fade from twentieth-century visions of the Dream when Peter Brook blew away all previous conceptions, conventions, and cliches with a radically different staging concept. What he called his "celebration of theater" put emphasis on the artificiality of the medium, and demonstrated the impossibility of designing a representational world for the play that a modern audience would believe in. The stage became a blank sheet on which the actors made their own magic through the art of theater itself. Brook's designer, Sally Jacobs, recalled:

  Peter wanted to investigate all the ideas of the play, such as the variations on the theme of love, with a group of actors--always inter-relating so that they could play each other's parts--in a very small, very intimate acting area. So the story would remain clear. It wouldn't be blown up into a big production number, with fogs, forests, and Athens, and all of that pretence. We would just keep it very, very simple and make it a presentation of actors performing a play. In doing "The Dream" that way, we could let it be surprising, inconsistent, the source material always being the text rather than a "scheme."19

  Jacobs designed a three-sided white box set, which was held in a constant white light so no trick could go unmissed. Darkness was removed from the forest and the action and characters thrown into sharp relief. The play opened without the traditional safety curtain (something we are used to now, but which was out of the ordinary at the time), with the full company juggling and tumbling. The set was seen variously by reviewers as a child's play box, "a squash court, a clinic, a scientific research station, an operatin
g theater, a gymnasium and a big top ... Two doors were cut in the back wall, two slits in the sides, two ladders set at the downstage edges, and a gallery or catwalk round its top [allowing] the musicians and fairies to gaze down at the players."20 The symmetry of the set with the doubling of the characters emphasized Hermia's words when she comes out of the "dream," "everything seems double." It also created an intense and intimate space where the tension never let up.

  Brook's device for distinguishing the different worlds was simple. There was no change in setting; the characters wore long robes in the Athenian court which they quickly removed to reveal their fairy-world costumes, like circus performers readying themselves for action. On leaving the forest at the end of the play the actors simply put the robes back on. Brook was keen to stress that the fairies, the aristocrats, and the mechanicals did not occupy different worlds but were facets of the same world. "The more one examines the play, the more one sees how these worlds interweave," he said.21 Irving Wardle, reviewing the production, commented:

  It provides an environment for the Dream which removes the sense of being earthbound: it is natural here for characters to fly ... Brook's company give the play a continuously animated physical line, occupying the whole cubic space of the stage and they ship up and down ladders and stamp about in enormous stilts ... We are accustomed to seeing them as inhabitants of different worlds. Brook shows them as members of the same world. Egeus's loss of his daughter is matched by Oberon's loss of his Indian boy. "This same progeny of evils comes from our debate," says Titania; and as Sara Kestelman delivers it, reclining on the huge scarlet ostrich feather that serves as her bower, the line is meant to embrace the whole action.22