A Midsummer Night's Dream (25 page)

Supple:
Yes. Bottom is the very core of the play. See above [
this page
]!

The fairies: large or small? Cute or sinister? They've been Victorian children clad in gossamer, they've been doubles of the mechanicals. What were yours like?

Boyd:
The fairies were dull, repressed courtiers let loose and strangely morphed and colored.

Doran:
The way we approached the fairies was to deal with their abstraction after we had dealt with the reality of them as individuals. Puck seemed to us like he was losing his touch. He was unable any longer to make Oberon smile, because Oberon has been distracted by his obsession with the changeling boy, and Puck, I think, is jealous of that. We felt that the First Fairy saying “Oh, you're that Puck character aren't you,” was a bit like somebody saying “Oh, you're that funny guy off the TV.” But Puck couldn't live up to that reputation any more. He was a bit like Tony Hancock or an old comedian whose jokes no longer work, who used to be great but suddenly it just isn't working for him. That was the beginning of our take on Puck. And Puck through the play regains Oberon's affection and revivifies as a fairy.

Similarly with Titania and Oberon, we needed to make sure that there was a real battle going on over the changeling boy, and a real sense of deep loss. It seems as though they can both have sex with human beings, but they can never have children. So the obsession with the changeling boy we thought was a very real obsession. Because I really wanted to focus attention on the changeling boy and his appeal to them, we made a Bunraku puppet of a lifesize toddler. If you want to have the changeling boy on the stage, children are immensely distracting. Even if they are good you still think they might fall over. Certainly what you couldn't do is have a child as young as the changeling boy is clearly meant to be. His mother, it
seems, has only recently given birth. We wanted the child to have a presence and we decided that by having a puppet, somehow the fairies would appear real and the puppet a mortal.

That introduced a whole other element in the play, which was an element of fantasy. I developed a relationship with the Little Angel Theatre, having done
Venus and Adonis
with them, and they provided a very special magic. There were two elements of that. One was that I noticed how often the word “shadow” is used in the play, and so felt shadow play might be a fascinating element. We all know from shining a torch against your hand as a child and it making a great big scary shadow on the bedroom ceiling, that shadows can create huge and extraordinary things. Once we had worked out that language it allowed us, when the fairies first appear and are gathering the dewdrops, to have fairies with huge Arthur Rackham wings, who were absolutely the sort of fairies that we immediately think of as fairies. The fairies from the Conan Doyle hoax. We were able to have fairies with great big wings and then undermine that. They could present themselves in your imagination but then they could be very real too.

I was very interested by Shakespeare's use of scale. Apparently the fairies can crawl into an acorn cup, but then Titania can have sex with a human being, so there's a variety of scale there. We spent quite a lot of time looking at those extraordinary Victorian fairy paintings; the mad, rather disturbing ones of Richard Dadd; the Irish painter Daniel Maclise's extraordinary paintings; and the famous fairy paintings by Fuseli and Noel Paton. We looked at how painters can easily enjoy that variety of scale. There are paintings of fairies fighting with owls and bats on a monster scale. We wanted to play with that. The shadow element helped with that, as did the use of dolls. I remember finding a sack of my sisters' old dolls when we were clearing out while moving house, and the dolls had lost their hair and eyes; they were weird-looking things. I showed them to my sisters and they were repelled by them. They found them rather disturbing; these creatures that they had loved and that had become real for them as children were now these ghastly monsters. When Bottom was attended by the fairies they all had these dreadful old dolls, which they presented to him so that the fairies could land on his hand. I used them as if the fairies were invisible unless they showed
the dolls. We played with the iconic idea of the fairy, and then we subverted that into something else.

We did want to make real the way that the dissension between Oberon and Titania has apparently turned the world upside down. So the rude mechanicals were constantly running through the rain. The seasons have altered. The world is uncannily changed. The “forgeries of jealousy” speech seems to suggest global warming. There seems to be this terrifying prospect that the world has been somehow damaged and is out of kilter, and the weather itself is changing. We wanted to utilize that to get away from the sense of the forest as a twinkly, starry place.

Supple:
We found the fairies the hardest characters to costume and tried several versions before the final costumes were created during the night between the dress rehearsal and opening performance in Delhi. But we never found them hard to play. We wanted to avoid all stylization and all decisions of one overall tone. We wanted the fairies to be as unpredictable as nature itself and free from all human psychology—especially restraint, morality, tactical thinking, guilt, responsibility, etc. We wanted creatures of pure action. In part they are distant cousins of Harlequin, always playful, and in part they are purely physical forces like dancers or acrobats. How they are comes from what they do. In 2.1 they fight like vicious insects; in 2.2 they magically bind Titania's lair with a spell to keep her at peace and asleep, then wrap Hermia and Lysander into their own chrysalis of sleep. In 3.1 they playfully provide a benign forest for the mechanicals made up of cane and cloth leaves and of fans and mops and nets. With Puck, they enjoy watching these strange mortals rehearse their play and then, like vicious children, they turn on the mechanicals and drive them mad by chasing them, a screeching assault, out of the forest. At Titania's demand, they attend to the new king of the fairies—Bottom, tying him up like Gulliver and leading him off to his lover's bed at the end of 3.1 in a wild bacchanalian dance. We wanted them to have the quality of Ovid's nymphs: immortal yet servile, free of all constraint yet shot through with an ultimate tragic sense that we see but they cannot. Like insects that live for a day, they have no awareness of what they are missing, or how lucky they are.

We felt that no single image or costume or characterization could encapsulate all this. We had to leave the performer's body and the audiences' minds free to imagine and enjoy. Like Brook and his designer, Sally Jacobs, we chose to let them be performers. Only the performer him/herself, we felt, could be this thing and indeed the nearest we humans can get to these spirits is in performance. The trickery, the playfulness, the athleticism, the skill, the immaturity, the exotic wisdom, the viciousness, the delightfulness, the tenderness, the glimpse of immortality that will never last—all this is touched best by the performer. So our fairies wear as few clothes as possible, all black: beautiful, simple clothes of performance that best suit their bodies and expose as much of their bodies as possible. Flesh and muscle, legs, backs, and arms: these are the key elements of our shadows' costume.

So, do you believe in fairies? More seriously, although this is traditionally the Shakespeare play that has the best chance of making children fall in love with Shakespeare in the theater (was it like that for you?), some astute critics increasingly feel that it is a—perhaps the—central Shakespearean play, because it is such a profound exploration of theater as dream, dream as theater … the ultimate embodiment of Coleridge's great remark about “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

Boyd:
The poetic faith of Bottom was at the center of our production, or at least our lantern through the forest of our expressed desires and fears and hates.

Doran:
The reason I enjoyed the elements of Puck and the mask and the shadow play is because, as an audience, you know how the effect is being produced, but you are still amazed by it. If you could do extraordinary technological things, that wouldn't be as surprising. You would just be rather unemotionally engaged in the trickery. Whereas if you bring the audience in, and allow their imaginations to fly with what's happening in the play, I think it is the most wonderful act of theater, because the play happens somewhere between the actor's imagination and the audience's imagination. It's that complicity which I think makes it such a special and such a blessed play. It is a great benediction.

7.
Bottom (Malcolm Storry) in Gregory Doran's shopping trolley, with puppet fairies.

It was surprising in many ways to us. Midsummer meant to the Elizabethans something very different to what it means to us today. To us it means Pimms, Wimbledon, long summer evenings, and that sense of relaxation. To the Elizabethans it was a precarious time, when the crops were in the ground but the harvest hadn't arrived. If the weather was bad at that time it could spell disaster, because if the crops failed shortages could lead to all kinds of rural discontent. It was a dangerous time. It was also a time of year when a portal opened between two worlds, and between Midsummer (St. John's Eve) and the feast of St. Peter the Apostle (23–29 June) was a time when fairies were supposed to be active. So there was a genuine sense of concern at that time. A Midsummer Night's Dream to a modern audience sounds a time of relaxation and contentment. In Elizabethan terms it doesn't have quite those connotations of beauty and relaxation and ease. In approaching the play right from the start we began to realize that there were more things going on, and that they were of serious import.

Supple:
The
Dream
is, for me, too, the essential expression of Shakespeare's theater. Playfully profound and profoundly playful; one foot in the ancient theater and one foot marching toward the modern theater; narratively exhilarating with time for no less than four major set pieces of song and dance; perfectly constructed; a canvas of characters that range from the highest aristocrat to a tinker, with characters drawn in meticulous detail or magnificent generality, as befits the needs of the drama. And in the center, the great invention of the fairies: immortals who are most like us. Ultimately the play shatters in its ability to draw all these elements together in an ending as central to the human experience as any work of theater that I know of or can imagine.

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory
pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe's mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.