A Midsummer Night's Dream

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

The acrobatics, circus skills, and trapeze acts of the actors defined them as magical beings that could defy gravity. In keeping with this, the costumes of the fairies resembled a cross between Chinese acrobats and romper-suits. Oberon, Titania, and Robin wore vivid primary colors, whereas the fairies of the lower hierarchy wore gray silk:

The fairies were no longer thought of as decorative, but as functional. They appeared as hefty circus hands when they swept up the confetti, as familiar spirits when they physically controlled the movements of the lovers and demoniacally trapped them in their steel forest, and as amoral trolls when they stripped Snug of his trousers and created an obscene phallus for Bottom.23

The box set that Adrian Noble opted for in 1994 was reminiscent of Brook's, but in its simplicity created an environment which suited his particular vision of the play: a low-walled, single-doored chamber was dominated by a trapeze, suggesting the surreal strangeness of a dream. Noble remarked that "of course in its first performance the Dream would not have had a wood. What we want to achieve is a sort of fluidity whereby the action is not held up by endless clumsy scene changes."24 The bare set allowed the fluidity of action, but also, "never let the audience forget that we are in the midst of a dream. At certain points in the evening, we hear the sound of heavy breathing, as if we were eavesdropping on the sleeping Shakespeare as he conjures his own play."25

Designer Anthony Ward, on discussing the concept with Noble, recalled that

we found ourselves talking in terms of abstract design, which led me to think immediately of the work of the French Surrealist painter Rene Magritte ... we were inspired by the idea of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a study of the world of dreaming and sleep. So what we needed was a design style which would allow us to present the conscious, real, world overlapping with the world of the subconscious ... [Magritte's] paintings juxtapose items from the ordinary, real world in a way which makes them seem strange and gives them a new and interesting resonance. So, in our production you see ordinary, household objects, such as an umbrella, transformed to serve a completely different function.26

Umbrellas were used as a means of levitation and flight. "Titania's chief mode of conveyance--and bedroom--[was] a vast, suspended Magritte umbrella sumptuously lined with red quilt."27 The use of doors which popped up through the floor and aided the action of the lovers had a psychological significance: "Why the doors and all the rushing in and out of them that duly ensues? You hardly need ask. People are passing from waking to dreaming, consciousness to subconsciousness, ignorance and self-discovery."28

In order to differentiate between the Athenian court and the forest, Noble's lighting designer, Chris Parry, lit the bare set with colors that were descriptive rather than representational--scarlet for Athens and indigo for the enchanted wood:

[Noble] didn't want trees, a forest, or anything like that ... I wanted to achieve a forest made out of beams of light and light bulbs ... most of the action ... takes place at night, but rather than using the straight-forwards "night-time" blue I have used a lot of purples and lavenders ... very sensuous colors which suggest the mysterious magical quality of night.29

Abstract stagings of the Dream are often met with slight hostility by audiences who come to the theater with a preconceived idea of what the play should look like. There is still a tendency for people to hark back to the Victorian image of the fairy in its idyllic forest setting. This holds a certain nostalgia, an innocence, going back to a time in history when people were still willing to believe in such things. However, the image is still prevalent in the social consciousness, and one that can still be found in most gift and card shops. Where these productions have succeeded is in the creation of a completely new magical space with a physical theatricality to complement Shakespeare's text.

"To wake and be free / From this nightmare we writhe in"30

Brook's production revealed to many viewers and critics that "the Dream is a fearful play."31 Picking up on this dark strand, many productions since have emphasized the nightmarish elements evident in the text. No more so than the RSC's 2002 production, which made direct references to modern horror films. The Guardian's veteran critic Michael Billington observed that

Richard Jones provides something closer to a gothic nightmare ... designer Giles Cadle [does] everything possible to create "the fierce vexation of a dream" ... Shakespeare's Athenian wood, here dominated by a humanised tree with claw-like branches, becomes a sinister conflation of Friday The Thirteenth, Hallowe'en and Edward Scissorhands. Fast breeding flies swarm over Cadle's box set, hands emerge through the walls as in Polanski's Repulsion and the transformed Bottom sports a disfigured mask with phallic ears while Puck carries his original head tucked underneath his arm.32