A Midsummer Night's Dream

Doran: I think that's right. The comedy of the play has to come out of a reality. It does descend into a fight, but that's not funny if they are not real people. I think there are moments of incredible revelation and shock. Hermia turns to Lysander and says "What, can you do me greater harm than hate?" If you just treat these as funny scenes and funny characters and don't investigate them properly, they won't be funny. But they are funny if you have rooted their desires in reality. Helena's sense of victimization is actually deeply disturbing. She says "Use me but as your spaniel." That girl needs therapy! Unless you get into the reality of that neurosis, the psychological abstraction of the forest doesn't work.

Supple: Of course: real everything! Pain, fear, abandonment, rape, but most of all terror in the face of themselves. Where do they end up by 3.2? Helena with no self-esteem, wishing only that "sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, / Steal me awhile from mine own company." Hermia, abandoned by best friend and devoted lover, trying to rip out Helena's eyes. The forest confronts each character with their most secret desire and fear of themselves. And surely this portrait would not be true if it did not include at least one moment in which Hermia did not want Demetrius and Helena Lysander? Helena cannot have entirely fabricated her image of Hermia sending out "some heat" to Demetrius. And the flower juice is not, of course, a magical potion but a force of super-nature, as simply symbolic as Cupid's arrow. It brings about what is in our hearts.

Robin Goodfellow is a kind of stage manager, isn't he? Shakespeare loved writing parts of that kind (Iago, Prospero, and Ariel, the Duke in Measure for Measure). Were there particular moments in your production that emphasized this aspect of the Puck's role?

Boyd: Puck would make a disastrous stage manager. He's much more of a Bottom than a stage manager. His egotistical lust for messing about in human lives is only matched by Bottom's egotistical urge to play every part in life. Iago may have liked to think of himself as Puck, but he was in fact a much meaner-spirited, smaller character. Aidan McArdle physically manipulated the lovers like a drunken Tadeusz Kantor [the revolutionary Polish artist and theater director]. He rode them, he beat them, and emptied buckets of earth on them. He has more uncomplicated, unguilty relish than either Prospero, Ariel, or the Duke.

Doran: Yes. As all the fairies become obsessed with the humans, he of course becomes obsessed with the rude mechanicals. He not only messes up the love potion, deliberately or otherwise, he also thoroughly enjoys involving himself in the play and turning Bottom into a literal ass. In a way you don't have to emphasize the stage manager role because it's very clearly there.

Supple: Yes, many. Philostrate starts the production, walking slowly to the front center and playing a strange, singing stone that starts the whole dream off. He sits at the front and watches the mechanicals in 1.2, transforming in front of our eyes into Puck as the stage transforms into the forest. He orchestrates the violent entanglement of the lovers in 3.2 by spinning a web of elastic around them and he signals both the start and the end of the interval. As Philostrate he sounds the hunting horns that wake Titania and Oberon up into Hippolyta and Theseus and, also as Philostrate, he makes the stage fit for Act 5. In the blessing dance he transforms again to Puck while Hippolyta and Theseus are transforming into their spirit alter egos. This all, of course, leads to the most wonderful fruition in the play when Puck offers the audience a simple understanding of the complex picture that has unfurled in front of their eyes: the actors are the shadows, the play a series of visions, and the experience of the event was itself only a dream.

Quince, Bottom, and friends: their play has got to be bad, but you don't want the theater audience to condescend to them, as some members of the onstage audience do during the performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe." How did you deal with this problem, how conceive the play-within-the-play?

Boyd: We always remembered that the mechanicals were a loving grotesque of Shakespeare's own chosen profession, and ours. The naivete of Quince's play and the mechanicals' stagecraft is just a comic rendering of the absurdity of our attempts to capture life in play form. Their imagination and their open hearts more than make up for their mistakes. They are the classic comic apologia to a potentially offended courtly audience: "Don't arrest us or close down our play: we're just a bunch of humble actors, who are a threat to nobody."

Doran: The rude mechanicals are intending to do the play as well as they can, they're just not very good. What we looked at, rather than a lot of comic business, was the moments we remembered from starting out in amateur theater. Those moments of excruciating embarrassment when something unplanned happened. Costumes dropping off, or, as I remember in panto in Lancashire, the vicar's teeth falling out. It's in the attempts to cover it up and keep on doing it well that terrible things happen. That was what made it funny.

We looked at the dirty jokes, which are a crucial part of "Pyramus and Thisbe," but are a very difficult part to play because the verbal jokes tend not to work. Terms like "stones" and "hole" don't quite register nowadays in the context of the play. We addressed that very specifically by making a costume go wro

ng. The chink has been demonstrated in the rehearsal in the forest as Snout holding his fingers to form a chink. But I don't think when it comes to the performance of the play in front of the duke that the chink being fingers allows the stones and hole jokes to work. So we imagined that Snout, in creating his wall costume--we used a laundry basket covered in lime and plaster, so he did look like a wall--had forgotten to provide a hole through which he could put his hand. So he had to lift it, which exposed his Y-fronts. As he turned to face Pyramus and Thisbe they were faced with either the front of the Y-fronts or the back of the Y-fronts, which led to the excruciating embarrassment of Flute and Bottom as they had to say these lines about kissing the wall's hole, or referring to his stones knit up "with lime and hair." It was their embarrassment about having to carry on, faced with this big red pair of Y-fronts, that produced the fun. But it was based on a real sense of the embarrassment of being onstage when something goes wrong, rather than trying to invent comic business which isn't really there.

Supple: Firstly, does it have to be bad? Or if so, how bad? And in what way bad? I would only say for sure that it needs to be artless. It must be, truthfully, a play performed by people who have not done plays--apart from one who started the play thinking that he knows more than he does about plays and acting. But has not even Bottom undergone some change, some transformation? Certainly also the language of "Pyramus and Thisbe" has many mistaken uses of English and crude examples of rhyme, meter, and vocabulary. But I am not sure how important the quality of the performance is. The most important questions that we asked about the play-within-the-play were the same as we would ask about any scene: what are they doing, for what end, and with what result? To answer this we made the simple decision to take the mechanicals as seriously as any characters in the play. We thought of them, in detail, as traders and craftsmen. We observed all the details we could from the text of what might be their work, their lives, their social status, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with theater. And we looked for how all these details might change through the course of the story. We were trying to escape from one of the most odious (or "odorous!") habits of the Dream in performance: to see the mechanicals as "comic relief" and their play as an excuse for endless directorial and actorly invention of ways in which these thoughtful, struggling men can be made to look foolish or cute. We tried several versions of their "Pyramus and Thisbe," each one an attempt to imagine just how they would do it given they have no money and little art, and indeed have had no time to rehearse as their first and last rehearsal was interrupted by Bottom's transformation. We thought about what kinds of theater they would have seen--probably theater from the street--and how this would inform their choices. Most of all, we thought about who they are and who they have become by the end of the play. In the end, our version has no mistakes, no invented business--rather, it attempts to reveal in a bare and honest way the experiences of those six men performing at the wedding of the most powerful monarch in their universe.

In terms of theater, I find their journey fascinating and moving and I feel that their version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is as interesting a passage about theater as the players' visit to Hamlet's Elsinore. Indeed it should be: Shakespeare has chosen to place it at the end. He has chosen it to be the climax of his action. After the performance there is the magnificent finale of the burgomasque, the exit of the couples to their sexual union, and then the blessing song and dance. This remarkable ending demands that the conclusion of the action before be of greater resonance and value than a bad play that makes us laugh. It needs to be, in some way, a conclusion. Perhaps an epiphany. Or at least an arrival. The mechanicals' journey from first meeting to performance via the forest is one in which they discover theater for themselves. In their first scene they encounter the basic fears that anyone may hold about performance. Will they become foolish? Will their limitations be exposed? Most of all, will their performance scare their aristocratic audience and lead to their punishment? There is little collective instinct in this first scene. There is conflict between the writer/director and the leading actor--a struggle for leadership--and there are individual issues and anxieties. In the forest this reaches a head. They confront the basic problems of theater: how to reassure the audience that it is not real (prologue) and how to make moonlight and a wall appear in an indoor room. The imaginative solutions that first Quince, then Bottom, propose--that both can be symbolized, simply, by an actor--bring the group together. In the first rehearsal, Flute has to learn the very basic dynamics of drama. Bottom's transformation into an ass drives a juggernaut through the play rehearsals but will ultimately ignite inspiration into its core. Firstly, the other men realize how much they value him and how much the play meant to them all. They will express this eloquently in 4.2. Secondly, Bottom becomes the only mortal of the play to cross over to the other side--to become the lover of the Queen of the Fairies. Titania promises him that she will purge his mortal spirit so that he will "like an airy spirit go." This is fulfilled in the performance. When he awakes, his wonder, and sense of the remarkable mystery that he has experienced, is immediately translated into artistic thinking: he will perform a ballad of his dream. When he returns to the group he has new dignity and poise. Now he can be truly believed as the natural leader he earlier imagined himself to be. In performance of the play he anchors a great achievement. They do it. And not only do they do it, each one of them masters some great challenge: Quince follows a disastrous first prologue with a cogent and passionate second; Snout is strong and dignified as Wall; Snug charms the ladies with eloquence and humility; Starveling overcomes terrible teasing to insist on his role; Flute takes on the female role with tremendous vigor. And Bottom is so inspired in his death that he imagines that his "soul is in the sky." However crude, however artless, surely something must occur, something must be stirred?

6. Pyramus (Joy Fernandes), Wall (Umesh Jagtap), and Thisbe (Joyraj Bhattacharya) in Tim Supple's production.

The workmen offer the aristocrats a play about the play we have just seen. In the dim recesses of their memory or dream, they and we must be somehow affected by the honesty and directness they bring to the center of the experience.

Tell us about your Bottom: the largest part (!), the most foolish character, but in his way the wisest, certainly the most lovable, but it's crucial to avoid sentimentality toward him, isn't it? And the specific choice of how to do his ass's head: a pair of ears and maybe a comic nose is one thing, a fully realistic animal head quite another. What did you go for? And would you say that this costuming decision plays a major part in determining whether the stage image of Bottom making love to Titania is essentially comical, politically subversive (a weaver making love to a queen!), or perverse and grotesque in the manner of Ovid's Metamorphoses (a beautiful woman having sex with a donkey)?

Boyd: Our Bottom opened the door to the transforming wood with the real force of his imaginative arrow. He and Puck were the two Lords of Misrule. He reminded Titania what happiness was, and provided an inspirational leader to the duke's Players. Daniel Ryan's Bottom's Pyramus was actually very good; it was just over-inventive and needed a stronger editor, a more forceful director, than Quince. A full donkey's head (as I had in Sheffield) is too literal and restricts the actor and risks us losing contact with him for too long. Big ears and a powerful groin are the only essential elements. Shakespeare clearly intends to refer to primitive bestiality as well as to subversive Lord of Misrule in Bottom's lovemaking with Titania. We had one foolish teacher who walked his children out of the theater and gained notoriety and a Guardian editorial defending us.

Doran: I think with Bottom you have to have a sense of a good-natured braggart. He is absolutely determined to play the biggest part, and all the other parts, which could make him completely intolerable. But then he is faced with this extraordinary fantasy of being wooed by, presumably, the most beautiful, glamorous creature he has ever seen. I remember when I was just starting out as a director, I did the p

lay in a community college in upstate New York. I went to do a seminar on the play in the psychology department and somebody asked me if I felt it was suitable for the students. When I asked why, they said, "Well, jealous husband makes wife have it off with donkey. Isn't that a rather disturbing message?" Of course that is true, in that there is a weirdly subversive sexual nonsense that goes on. But I think it's so funny because Bottom is who Bottom is. If you play with the element of the play's dark sexuality as being as psychologically complex and dangerous as that, I think you're in danger of tipping the whole play over. I think he plays it with a sort of wit and lightness. I think if you really investigate what Oberon has done, when Titania wakes up and realizes "I just had it off with a donkey," then I don't think there would be any measure of reconciliation between them. There is an exuberant, primal, primitive joy about the whole thing. That's where it becomes a most fantastical dream: where things start morphing into different shapes and it becomes weird and wonderful. I think there is a darkness to it, but a Jan Kott level of darkness just topples the play.

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."