A Midsummer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare

  5. Titania (Josette Simon) and Bottom (Daniel Ryan) in Michael Boyd's sexually charged RSC production.

  Supple: Our only use of modern technology is in the lighting--which is very important to the production--and in the microphones that lift the levels of our live musical instruments to fill the large theaters in which we play. On the other hand, we never rely simply on language and the audience's imagination alone. However minimal, there is always some intervention from the set, the light, or the music to help define a moment. There is a very interesting way in which the most traditional theater practice--still alive in India today--meets with contemporary imaginative theater approaches in the West. In our production a limited set of resources--musical instruments played live, or sticks, rope, silks, and elastic, or even a rubber tire--have provided limitless possibilities of imaginative play. In a way, we are trying to combine the playfulness and freedom of children with the refined, layered sophistication of the wisdom and experience found in the text. In 3.2, when the four lovers dissolve into a deadly fight of jealous rivalry, our Puck gleefully weaves a web of elastic around them in which they become entangled and flail to the point of desperation. This is certainly an addition to the language and a stimulant to the audience's imagination. It suggests another shape to the forest floor, but it also plays a very simple trick on the lovers--one that a child could conceive of, but that also plays with their entangled love with the force of Cupid. This is in fact what the mechanicals themselves discover in 3.1: how do you "bring the moonlight into a chamber"? You get a man to suggest moonshine with a torch and bush! Ingenious, playful, and symbolic.

  In what sense was your Hippolyta an Amazonian captive? And how seriously did you take Oberon's assertion that Theseus (led on by Titania) is a serial rapist?

  Boyd: Josette Simon has great beauty and dignity and was dressed elegantly as Hippolyta, but chastely. She and Oberon stood far apart as their forthcoming wedding was announced to choreographed applause. Disharmony lay beneath the optimistic rhetoric in the summer snow.

  Doran: We felt Theseus was actually a very ordinary man who had this fantasy. Oberon and Titania see them in mythological terms as fantasies that they want to play out. Oberon's description seems to have no relationship to Theseus at all. Theseus himself has a very strange attitude to any kind of imaginative capacity, finding it all a bit suspicious. It seemed to us that that was Oberon and Titania creating a sort of mythological context for the play. I think you could see in my production that there is a relationship to that myth, but that it was another layer of fantasy. I don't think it helps to see Theseus as a serial rapist.

  Supple: Shakespeare is enigmatic, or very open, about both Hippolyta and Theseus. Who knows how much this was deliberate or the mark of unfinished work? But the most interesting approach is to assume that it was deliberate and, rather than fixing the nature of Hippolyta's captivity or Theseus' character, leave it as open as possible. We know that they have fought and that Theseus has won and we know that they get married. We don't know how Hippolyta feels about this. Her first words are ambiguous and could be convincingly played as both willing compliance and biting resentment. When decisions have to made, we tried to make just enough to bring a story to life and to create the sense of journey and change that all good stories need. In our production, Hippolyta has lost a war, agreed to marry, but has no love for Theseus. An Amazonian queen, she has no voice in Athens' court. Her journey is to come to terms with the situation she is in: his journey is to win her love--not through conquest or through spectacle. This occurs in 4.1 when his flexibility leads him to champion the young lovers over Egeus and the law. What has occurred to bring about this change? We know nothing about Theseus and Hippolyta after 1.1. The process of change is surely to be found in the forest. Titania and Oberon are the continuation of the battle between Hippolyta and Theseus and their turbulent, ferocious fight over marital power, sexual ownership, a child, and the world that they are responsible for is the dream-catharsis that exorcises and resolves the buried issues and frustrations between the two mortal monarchs. We have to take everything that one character says about another seriously, while remembering that it is only the perspective of one character. We would not be surprised if Theseus was a rapist--surely this is common to many powerful figures of myth? But we would not be surprised if Oberon is exaggerating in his jealousy and anger. What we can assume is that Theseus has yet to learn love in its tender, thoughtful, selfless sense. He must make the journey from absolute monarch-soldier who wins his wife on the battlefield to a man who knows love. He is given this by Oberon and Titania, who sit beautifully poised between two modern notions, being both alter egos and spirit-gods of love.

  What's going on with all that business in which Oberon and Titania fight over the Indian boy? Some productions actually include the boy in the cast ...

  Boyd: In my Crucible production the boy was played by Mumta Gupta, the gorgeous son of Nirmal Gupta, who ran by far the best curry house in Sheffield and loved the snooker. We had no onstage boy in Stratford, but his unconscious root might be the Child Christ whose mother the Virgin Mary has been so recently banished from English spirituality. Titania's account of disharmony has strong suggestions of an England out of joint following the Reformation.

  Doran: [See Doran's answer to the question about the fairies, this page.]

  Supple: Again, this is an enigmatic, or open, aspect of the play and one can either explain it clearly or leave it open. We chose the latter while never forgetting that it is at the heart of what they are arguing about and so must be essential to their very beings. We are told by Puck that Oberon wants the boy to be a special member of his followers--a scout or ranger. We can imagine that a little mortal child would be as special to a spirit as a spirit-child would be to a mortal. But it is hard to believe that this is all such a terrible fight is about. In the argument between them in 2.1 we can surmise that Oberon is furious that his request is being denied, and perhaps the boy has become a symbol of the love and sexual partnership that she is denying him. "Am not I thy lord?!" he thunders when she tries to leave his company again. Is the boy the battleground for marital power within which sexual availability and fidelity is the real issue? This is possible, but does not feel quite deep or rich enough to enter the bloodstream of such a play of wonderful humanity. It is striking what emerges in Titania's speech when she is pushed. The boy is a child of a woman who loved her and with whom she shared tenderness, humor, and friendship. The woman died, and for her sake Titania has made the boy her own. Is the potent issue here the fact that, being immortals, Titania and Oberon cannot have children? In a play in which all the characters yearn to be other than they are, is it Titania and Oberon's yearning to have a child, to be a family? This is not so fanciful: at the end of the play they come to the marriage beds to bless the sexual union of the three couples and the children that they will have. If the ending requires some profound union between all the characters of the play, this might indeed make a deep connection between the immortal and mortal worlds. One of the toughest challenges presented by the boy in the play is simply to make it clear--a common phrase one hears from audiences at productions of the Dream is: "What exactly are Oberon and Titania fighting about?" It can be useful and interesting to have the boy in the show, as we do, to help establish the character firmly in the story. However, even this cannot make the argument easily clear to all watching. Perhaps, like all marriages, the exact issue in a falling-out can never be clear to outsiders. Or perhaps the most important clue is in the mystery itself. A great concern of the play is the mystery of the immortal or spirit world. We yearn to touch it. In love and art (theater) we can glimpse it, but it will remain a mystery. A dream.

  Though it requires some very quick costume changes, many productions double Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania. Did yours? Why? Why not? Gains and losses, discoveries?

  Boyd: We were bound to double them as our premise was that the woods were a transforming agent on Athenian l
ife, permitting the release of repressed or taboo ideas and urges. The biggest single gain was the moving and dangerous moment when Bottom approached Hippolyta in the burgomasque dance. Both of them half understood what they had each "dreamed" the night before. The humanizing of Nick Jones as Theseus through Oberon was also powerful.

  Doran: We didn't. The reason was that it has actually become the norm to double them. It's fine for Oberon and Titania, but the worry I had was that Hippolyta and Theseus are rather diminished. You stop regarding them in their own right, and I wanted to look at them in their own capacities and at their own agendas, to try to understand who they are. There's a physical moment which is very difficult, because you have to have an extraordinarily quick change when they go off and come straight back on again, which seems to indicate to me that it was not the original purpose to double them. Rather than effect a clever quick change I decided not to have that at all and to try and look at them in their own right. I think that brought distinct advantages theatrically. One problem is that, when you get to the moment when Oberon and Titania are reconciled, which I think is an incredibly important moment in the play, then that moment becomes loaded with the practical issue of how you are going to do the quick change. When the fairies come back on right at the end of the play after Theseus and Hippolyta and the lovers have all gone off to bed, and there is a sense of the play coming to an end, I think not doubling the roles increases the audience's sense of wonder and delight. There's a growing sense of joy there, and I love the fact that Oberon and Titania do come back to enter the palace. The danger is that if Theseus and Hippolyta do another quick change you are more aware of the quick change than you are of the wonder of the moment. There's a sense of benediction at the end of the play. It shows it clearly wasn't just a dream after all. The fairies' role has been reestablished as somehow preservers of the natural order and their benediction of the mothers and the newlyweds was somehow more special without the doubling.

  Supple: We did double Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania as well as Philostrate with Puck. Even Egeus appears in the forest as a spirit. It seemed absolutely natural to do this on the page and it feels absolutely natural in performance. The reasons are numerous. The perfect structure of the play invites it: the mortal court disappears from view for the middle three acts, leaving its key actors idle if they are not to reappear as the spirit-court. Without this doubling, Theseus and Hippolyta have no process of change or travel: the doubling creates a rich physical and psychological experience at the heart of the play. The core meaning of the play lies in transformation and the forest is the place of change. The lovers transform with wild and released ferocity into sexual animals. Bottom of course transforms into the ultimate sexual beast--the compliant ass. Becoming Titania and Oberon is the transformation undergone by Hippolyta and Theseus. As the spirit-monarchs, they too are released from the restraining forces of civilized society. They can fight their way with no holds barred through the painful, turbulent forest of sexual jealousy, marital power, and mutual frustration. Like all classic folktales, the time and place of transformation is elsewhere and must be forgotten to the conscious mind. Bottom cannot hold on to the memory of his experience in the forest, nor can the lovers. How much more rich is this sense of dream if it is common to all the characters in the play? Hippolyta and Theseus' dream is to have been Titania and Oberon. This makes the stage one and binds the audience into a sensation of dream: "That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear." What losses there might be is hard to guess at--one would have to play the play the other way to discover. The most obvious loss would be a greater sense of concrete, discreet character in each mortal and each immortal. One might gain a sense of travel--of leaving the court, the city, and entering another, very different world. It would allow extreme differences in casting. One could even play with the two worlds colliding more often. Indeed we can surmise that in Shakespeare's time the mechanicals doubled with the fairies. This completes the dream, the surrealism of the mortal world becoming the immortal world. However, we definitely wanted mechanicals who would bring a reality to the stage and who would convince as workingmen from India's streets. This demanded a very different kind of performer and physical personality to those we cast as fairies. Having two different groups produced a vivid contrast between them and created a rich human canvas. It also allowed two wonderful events of meeting: 3.1 and the end.

  Hermia and Helena are sharply differentiated, not least by their differing height, but sometimes the boys seem indistinguishable--there are moments when even seasoned playgoers can be hard put to remember who is in love with whom at which moment. That's partly the Puck's fault, of course, but would you say that the director needs to work especially hard to help actors realize Demetrius and Lysander distinctively?

  Boyd: There's no excuse for confusing the characters of Lysander and Demetrius. Lysander is clearly a passionate rebel, prone to fits of melancholy. His vivid sense of mortality and his wooing techniques bring readily to mind the young John Donne: the young outsider courtier of the wrong persuasion. He's one of many trainee Hamlets. Demetrius, on the other hand, is a trainee Laertes. He has a passion in him, but it is buried, and takes second place to the main chance. The Dream could, in one sense, be subtitled "The Awakening and Education of Demetrius." He's the one lover who is truly and permanently transformed by the experience, and it is a good thing that he ends up a little more like Lysander.

  Doran: I think there is a distinct psychology behind all of them. Hermia and Helena are not just distinguished by their heights. Hermia is this spoilt little princess, who has always been the apple of her important father's eye, who has lived this very privileged existence and has had everything she wants, including the love of Lysander. She's a very determined little madam. I think she uses Lysander, who at the beginning of the play you can absolutely understand as the person that Hermia's father would not want to hang around his daughter. He's a bit of a wastrel. We had him physically sloppier. He's interested in love and the language of love. He's a sort of philosopher in his own mind, whereas Demetrius is the man Hermia's father wants her to marry. He is a city type, a Hooray Henry. The advantage of having the boys in modern dress is that you can have certain signifiers for an audience. If Demetrius is dressed rather uptight, neatly cut hair, city suit, the Man Most Likely To, then you can distinguish him very clearly from Lysander, who wears rather romantic sloppy clothes and has long hair. Hermia is the princess. Helena is paranoid about her height and has rather low self-esteem. What the forest does is expose those paranoias. Hermia, who has always had love and just had to click her fingers for it to come to her, is suddenly abandoned, loved by neither of the men and left wandering around the forest by herself. I think that's very frightening for her. I don't think she's ever had to fall back on her own resources like that before. Helena is a bit of a masochist who has fallen comfortably into the position of playing the victim in life. Her problem is partially that she enjoys playing the victim. She says "But herein mean I to enrich my pain." It's an almost masochistic enjoyment of not being loved, proving that she is not worthy of love by chasing the wrong partner. Yet in the forest she finds herself being chased and adored by two men. Initially she finds it rather disturbing--they must be joking--and then she finds that there are certain advantages, and a certain power struggle evolves because of that. Lysander might be a bit soppy but he does hold true to his love. The revelation at the end comes when Demetrius admits that he has behaved badly, and from being a very arrogant man he becomes a very humble man. All of them have their true selves exposed in the forest. A mirror is held up exposing who they really are and it's very disturbing to see, but they come out of the forest with a better sense of vision. Their vision might be blurry initially, but ultimately they see each other and themselves much more clearly as a result of the night in the forest.

  Supple: As usual Shakespeare sits finely poised between ancient and modern theatrical tastes with very interesting results
. Actually the two boys are quite distinct in their actions and words--and they are different to each other both before and after the flower. Lysander is an idealist: a love warrior. His cult is love as he has read, thought, and dreamt of it. He shows courage and the instincts of an adventurer in his pursuit of fidelity: suggesting elopement for marriage and restraining his lust for Hermia in the forest when she calls on him to do so. The flower of course reveals his other side: with Helena he releases his lust, ferocity, and cruelty. It becomes urgent for him to have Helena, destroy Demetrius, and crush Hermia.