THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible--a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made "our contemporary" four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an "RSC stage history" to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He, or sometimes she (like musical conducting, theater directing remains a male-dominated profession), must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF THE DREAM: AN OVERVIEW
Interpretations and ideas about the play have altered radically over the four centuries since its first performance around 1595-96. Theories suggesting that it was written to celebrate an aristocratic wedding have fallen into disfavor. The Quarto edition of 1600 claims that it had "beene sundry times publickly acted" by the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) and it may be the play referred to in a letter which records a court performance of the "play of Robin goode-fellow" on 1 January 1604.1 There is no further evidence of performance before the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Will Kempe, the company's chief comic actor at this period, may originally have played Bottom and Richard Burbage Oberon, possibly doubling the role with Theseus. The text suggests Titania's fairies were small-sized and may have been played by boys, although recent research based on the pattern of appearances of fairies and mechanicals suggests that the same actors may well have doubled these parts,2 a theory perhaps corroborated by the cast list of the 1661 droll The Merry conceited Humours of Bottome the Weaver, which suggests that Snout, Snug, and Starveling as Wall, Lion, and Moonshine "likewise may present three Faries."3
The play's combination of realism and fantasy was not to the taste of Restoration audiences. Samuel Pepys judged it "the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life."4 Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century taste preferred romanticized, sanitized versions of Shakespeare's plays. The drama was heavily influenced by French neoclassicism's strict adherence to the unities of time, place, and action: decorum was observed and bawdy language eliminated. Theatrical productions emphasized spectacle and there were a number of operatic adaptations which featured the play's courtly aspects, with music and dancing. William Hazlitt, writing in 1817, argued against all performance on the grounds that theatrical representation is, by its very nature, gross and material, unlike Shakespeare's airy conception: "The Midsummer Night's Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. Poetry and the stage do not agree well together."5 In fact the version that Hazlitt saw was most likely Frederick Reynolds' 1816 adaptation, as much a musical as a play.
From the Restoration onward, thanks to technical innovation, increasingly sophisticated theatrical machinery, and movable stage sets, spectacular operatic versions of the play predominated, culminating in the extravaganzas of the great Georgian and Victorian actor-managers such as John Philip Kemble, Charles Kean, Henry Irving, and Beerbohm Tree. Ballet-style productions featured choruses of fairies, processions with spears and trumpets, and acres of gauze. Mid-and late-nineteenth-century productions focused on pictorial realism and attempted to "illustrate" the plays. Great emphasis was placed on the recreation of historical accuracy in costume and sets to create a complete theatrical illusion. For example, James Grieve, the designer for Kean's 1858 production, aimed at historical accuracy--the playbill boasted that "The Acropolis, on its rocky eminence, surrounded by marble Temples, has been restored, together with the Theater of Bacchus, wherein multitudes once thronged to listen to the majestic poetry of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides."6 Realism was taken to the extreme, reproducing Quince's workshop and stage properties supposedly made by him, which used descriptions of objects found in the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum for the tools. Tree's production actually recreated the "bank where the wild thyme blows" and imported live rabbits to scamper across it in his 1911 revival.7
Adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream separated out the different elements of the play. The anonymous droll published in 1661 under the title Bottom the Weaver was chiefly concerned with the "rude mechanicals," though it provided abbreviated roles for Oberon, Titania, and Robin. "Duke," "Duchess," and two "Lords" represented the courtly audience. In 1692 Thomas Betterton produced The Fairy Queen, An Opera with music by Henry Purcell. This included court characters, "The Fairies," "The Comedians," and a masque at the end of each act, including "Juno," "Chinese Men and Women," "A Chorus of Chineses" (sic), "A Dance of 6 Monkeys," "An Entry of a Chinese Man and W
oman," "A Grand Dance of 24 Chineses." Richard Leveridge's The Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716) contained the mechanicals plus "Mr Semibreve the Composer," "Crochet," "Gamut," as well as "Prologue," "Pyramus," "Wall," "Lyon," "Moonshine," "Thisbe," and "Epilogue." And the 1763 adaptation A Fairy Tale in Two Acts featured "Men" (the mechanicals) and "Fairies."
In 1775 David Garrick staged The Fairies: An Opera taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which featured courtiers and fairies but no mechanicals. It included twenty-eight songs and was moderately successful, certainly in comparison with his later five-act, thirty-three song version--that lasted only one performance. In 1816 Frederick Reynolds presented his version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The title page describes it as "Written by Shakespeare: with Alterations, Additions, and New Songs; as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden." In his "Advertisement" for the play, Reynolds denigrated Garrick's earlier version. Nevertheless, he used quite a lot of the material from it, notably the songs, and his text was almost as abbreviated, although he did reinstate the mechanicals. Lucia Elizabeth Vestris' 1840 production, in which she played Oberon, although still lavish and incorporating elements of opera and ballet, restored much of Shakespeare's text. Felix Mendelssohn had originally written the overture to his "Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1826 (opus 21), composing the rest of the score sixteen years later (opus 61) for Ludwig Tieck's 1843 revival at the Potsdam Court Theatre.
In 1853 Samuel Phelps staged a highly successful production at Sadler's Wells, in which he played Bottom. Three years later, Charles Kean's revival at the Princess's was equally successful--the nine-year-old Ellen Terry played Robin, an experience recalled in her autobiography.8 Augustin Daly's three American productions (1873, 1888, 1895-96) were lavish and spectacularly staged, with a ballet of fifty children in Act 3. Beerbohm Tree's productions were even more extravagant, but no less popular with audiences and critics alike: "No scene has ever been put upon the stage more beautiful than the wood near Athens in which the fairies revel and the lovers play their game of hide-and-seek."9
The self-reflexive quality of Shakespearean drama was eliminated in all these adaptations and the conventions of Elizabethan staging regarded as limitations to be overcome. The end of the Victorian period saw the beginnings of a contemporary reaction against theatrical realism and the spectacular in favor of simpler, faster-paced productions which used all or most of Shakespeare's text on recreated Elizabethan-style stages. The most influential directors in this move were William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker. Gordon Craig also offered simplified staging of the play and a full text. Barker's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Savoy Theatre in 1914 created a critical sensation which was not wholly favorable. In his Preface to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Barker argued that the non-realism of the play, like the "greatness" of King Lear and the "scope of the action" of Antony and Cleopatra, were problematic for the scenic productions of the modern theater. He suggested producing the play on Shakespeare's own terms, with an appeal to the ear and the imagination of the audience. The structure of the play should be kept flexible. He also advocated the use of folk music and dances as opposed to the by then customary Mendelssohn score. Barker made it clear, though, that his emphasis was Shakespeare's own theme:
1. Victorian staging with elaborate set and huge troupe of gossamer-clad fairies.
In fine, Shakespeare has a theme, which only poetry can fully illuminate, and he trusts to poetry. Nor will he risk any conflict of interest, all the rest of his dramatist's equipment must cry small for the occasion. Wherefore we in our turn must plan the play's interpretation upon these terms. Poetry, poetry; everything to serve and nothing to compete with it!10
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 perform
ative 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 postmodernity, 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.
AT THE RSC
The Shifting Point
In A Midsummer Night's Dream the war amongst the fairies has resulted not only in a loss of control of elements and seasons: human beings also have become at odds with each other. It is a kind of cold war and all life as well as all nature has been set a-jangling. It seems that the mortals can find peace only when Oberon and Titania have found it. And more than this--they can find it only after being drawn into the world of Dreams back to the roots of mythology and folklore and into Oberon's domain of half-light--more revealing by far in its fantasies than the world of Reality.
(Program note from A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1960, Old Vic, directed by Michael Langham)