A Midsummer Night's Dream (18 page)

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

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 performative 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 post-modernity, 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.

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:

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,