A Midsummer Night's Dream

The disorientating and starkly black and white set, like an "optical magician's camera obscura,"33 combined the surreal and the abstract: "a wonky oblong that's half-moon, half-egg; cigarette-like cylinders with steps cut into their ends; a sort of squashed ice-cream cone that weirdly doubles as a train on which the rude mechanicals, themselves a grey-garbed ... blend of Soviet convicts and British hikers, decide to arrive."34

The sex and horror that Jan Kott found in the play were taken to their extreme: "Titania resembling a debauched Hamburg nightclub queen"35 and Robin taking Hermia's line "O hell! To choose love by another's eyes" literally, by physically removing and then swapping the eyes of the lovers. Many reviewers felt the actors and the plot were overwhelmed by the mechanics of this imaginative design. They describe them as "competing" with the set and the interpretation of the play, which often worked against the text. However, others felt that this production tapped "into something important. In giving us the Bard as Goth, and putting the 'witch' back into bewitching, it reminds us how dark and disturbing this play--Shakespeare's most beguiling--can be."36

Albeit with a subtler tone, this emphasis was also strong in John Barton's 1981 production. He, too, in the words of critic Jay Halio,

totally rejected any cute, gauzy, bewinged creatures and opted instead for wooden puppets that closely resembled the kind of Victorian dolls beloved by the makers of horror films ... Manipulated by black clad actors and actresses who also spoke their lines, those fairies Shakespeare failed to nominate were dubbed in the programme "Black Boy," "Girl with Red Hair," "Broken Head," etc.... At one point, Oberon had to fight his way past a mass of screeching dolls to get to Titania's bower.37

These puppet fairies first appeared, flying out from a wicker prop basket, trailing colored streamers in various stages of disintegration and decay that moved "in large sweeping and diving motions [against a] black cyclorama, they seem like small macabre souls, darting silently in the blackness ... They hover in the air protectively, around Titania, and they watch anxiously as the fairy king and queen quarrel, shifting and darting, their puppet limbs sometimes clacking quietly in the silence like bones."38 The style of the whole production led reviewers to question what had been described as the RSC's salute to the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. "If so," wrote Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman,

it's an ambiguous one, with something akin to two fingers sprouting from the patriotically outstretched arm ... the doubling of real and fairy king and queen, with the suggestion that Oberon's revenge on Titania reflects and resolves Theseus's subconscious hostilities toward Hippolyta, his bride-to-be. In other words, Chuck might feel better about Di if he imagined her having sex with a prole with a donkey's head.39

In Gregory Doran's entertaining 2005 production, the mortal world was "a chilly, soulless place, with a suggestion of the totalitarian state about it."40 More nightmarish and unforgiving than the fairy world, Theseus' military uniform made him resemble "a fascist leader."41 With a death threat hanging over her head, Hermia's escape into the forest with Lysander takes her from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Jonathan Slinger's refreshingly lugubrious and mischievous Robin plays with the lovers as if they are puppets for his amusement. In the hands o

f this curmudgeonly skeptic, who has no qualms about his treatment of mortals, one would fear for their fate if he were not tempered by his master, Oberon, who feels for the lovers' plight.

The Spectator's reviewer, Patrick Carnegy, remarked that

The fairy band is a motley crew of ragamuffins who have one important accomplishment--their magic is that of puppeteers ... Doran gives us the changeling boy as an exquisitely animated puppet ... Bottom's attendants materialise as a macabre collection of doll-puppets manipulated by their fairy alter egos ... whenever Mustardseed opens his mouth to speak, his head pops up and away off his body.42

The themes of manipulation and entrapment in the forest scenes culminated when Robin led the lovers "Up and down, up and down." Working together, the fairies physically manipulated the lovers' movements like their "doll-puppets," holding onto their limbs and guiding them to the appointed place for Robin to send them to sleep.

Nightmares, as other dreams, offer the possibility for self-exploration and understanding. The lovers, Titania, and Bottom all learn through a period of transformation, akin to a waking dream, that the exploration of the worst parts of themselves can free them from nightmare. Scholar Stanley Wells commented in the program note that

As the lovers go off to marriage, we are likely to feel that they have been through a necessary but profoundly disturbing experience, and that now they are safely on the other side of it. The experience has grown "to something of great constancy," enriching their lives just as Bottom's "rare vision" enriches his. They bring back into the ordinary world something that they learned in the world of imagination. The illusory has its part in the total experience of reality.43

In avoiding the baggage of treating the Dream as a light fairy-piece for children, many directors have chosen to focus on the darker elements of the play, with varying success. The difficulty for them arises in trying to strike a balance between the comedy and the darkness.

Everything Seems Double

The doubling of the fairy and mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream may appear now as the normal directorial choice. However, this development in staging has only been prevalent in the last fifty years. Through this device directors have explored the relationship between the mortals and the fairies in terms of the conscious and the unconscious.

In 1970 this was a relatively new innovation which radically altered the reading of the play, and extended the psychological journey of Bottom and the four lovers to all the mortals. Brook's Dream depicted the unconscious enactment of unresolved tensions which needed to be explored before the royal couple could come together in happy marriage at the end of the play. The director himself explained:

The play unfolds like a dream before [Theseus and Hippolyta's] wedding in which an almost identical couple appear--Oberon and Titania. Yet this other couple are in an opposition so great that, as Titania announces in a language of great strength, it brings about a complete schism in the natural order ... Thus on the one hand we have a man and woman in total dispute and, on the other, a man and woman coming together through a concord found out of a discord. The couples are so closely related that we felt that Oberon and Titania could easily be sitting inside the minds of Theseus and Hippolyta.44

In Bill Alexander's 1986 production only Hippolyta and Titania were doubled, while Theseus and Oberon were played by separate actors:

The key to Mr. Alexander's interpretation lies in the moment when, as the rude mechanicals come on stage to rehearse, Janet McTeer's elegant, disdainful Hippolyta passes them on her way off. She and Bottom exchange a long appraising look across a social chasm. What follows is, in effect, Hippolyta's dream.45

This Hippolyta, described as "glacial and contemptuous"46 in the Athenian scenes, obviously did not relish the prospect of marriage to the boring Theseus. She "has the opportunity to express an inner life--a slinkily clad ice-maiden whose fantasies are realized by transformation into a fairy queen of bewitchingly tender sexual desire."47 Her Oberon (Gerard Murphy) became the ideal partner, equal to her in physical strength and passion. The wordless coda at the start of the play also put a different spin on Titania's relationship with Bottom:

In the wood, the affection between [Bottom] and [Titania] is played almost completely "straight," emphasizing both its realness and its impossibility. Love that crosses barriers in the night's most hopeless "dream," sprinkling regret over the ubiquitous frolics.48

This Bottom was gentler and more sympathetic, a true alternative to the chauvinism of Theseus and Oberon; consequently, he drew from Titania a warm and tender response, which, if it did not entirely eliminate the element of lustful sensuality, de-emphasised it considerably.49

At the end of the play, Hippolyta stepped into the fairy ring and--as Titania--sang the blessing with Oberon to the newlyweds, harmonizing the worlds of the play, and emphasizing the connection between reality and dreams.

In Michael Boyd's 1999 production, the fairies were played as doppelgangers of the mortals, releasing their inner selves from their daytime personae. According to Times critic Benedict Nightingale,

Theseus and Hippolyta become their subconscious selves, Oberon and Titania. They dream out their conflicts and marry happily. But Boyd takes the approach further ... Athens itself sheds its superego and lets its id rampage, until Theseus, Hippolyta, lovers, mechanicals, everyone, are clattering together in a dance that Zorba himself would have found too anarchic.50

Aidan McArdle, who doubled as Robin and Philostrate, explains that Act 3 Scene 2, in which Oberon comforts Robin's fear at the coming dawn, was given an added significance by the whole concept of the production:

We had it in our heads as we played this ... that they were afraid of turning back into their daylight selves. As it gets light Puck must be transformed into that monster Philostrate--and Philostrate is as much a monster for Puck as Puck is for Philostrate.51

The opening scenes in the Athenian court contained virtually no color; the characters were wrapped up in large dark overcoats. The fairy world emerged from the mortal world via a simple device:

The repressed, regimented, grey court, reminiscent of Cold-War Russia, would move to the forest by way of the transformation scene, which would begin with artificial flowers (the first color in the play) sprouting through the stage floor.52