If the visual image of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the nineteenth century was the gauzy-winged fairy, the immediate icon of the late twentieth century was the up-thrust arm between Bottom's legs, the oversized ass's penis created by two actors positioned to show arousal in Peter Brook's 1970 staging of the play ... What Brook did was corrective; he was reinserting and reissuing the seminal strand of sexuality into the mainstream of the play's production history.57
Despite being in a recognizable tradition of modern productions of the Dream, Michael Boyd's 1999 production was criticized for its overtly sexual reading of the play. He warned the public before it opened:
It won't be a decorative, picturesque dream world, or about public-school lovers with no sexual organs ... [Oberon's fairies were all male and Titania's all female] ... Just as Titania has refused Oberon her bed, so that diktat runs all through the fairy world. The wood will be full of sexual tension ... It won't remind you of a mythical Athens, but of fundamentalist society in the vice-grip of Puritanism and arranged marriage. That's the world Shakespeare was exploring.58
When Titania begins her amour with furry-eared Bottom, the effect is usually a little less erotic than the teddy bears' picnic. Not in Michael Boyd's bold and brilliant revival ... Multiple orgasms are clearly occurring in the bed hovering above the stage ... When Josette Simon's squirming, leggy fairy queen tells Daniel Ryan's post-coital Bottom that one of her ogling attendants will "fetch thee new nuts," her hand is on a part of his body that suggests she does not just mean tasty acorns.59
A party from a local Catholic school walked out of this production at the interval. Their teacher felt it was unsuitable for children, declaring that "The production has driven a horse and carriage through our school's religious and sex education policies." The tabloids headlined: "Sir Leads Walkout as Bard Sex Shocks Kids" (Mirror) and "Children Shocked by Shakespeare in Lust" (Daily Mail).
Bottom strolls his way between the world of reality, theatricality, and the supernatural. His transformation gives the traditional hobbyhorse of the May Day celebration an ironic twist. The hobbyhorse combined the ritualized promise of communal renewal and regeneration through the hybridization of man and beast. Deriving from pagan origins, he symbolized fecundity and continuity. In Elizabethan London, records show that the hobbyhorse was known at Midsummer pageants and at other seasons, in church, city, and court activities. Bottom's transformation, which Jan Kott found both "fascinating and repulsive," has gone comically wrong--instead of being as virile as a beast and as beautiful as a human, it has worked the other way around. The nature of his "translation" turns Titania's desires from something potentially dark into something comic.
There is a tendency for people to assume that because a play contains fairies and magical elements that it has been written for children. This was not true in Shakespeare's day, when a belief in the supernatural pervaded all ages and classes of society. Applauded by most critics for its inventiveness, Michael Boyd's production did have its critics who felt that the overtly sexual reading of the dream, which began for the RSC with Peter Brook, had become old hat. It appeared as though the Dream had come full circle, and that audiences were looking forward to the next radical and imaginative rethink of this complex play. They found it with Tim Supple's extraordinary multilingual Indian production for Dash Arts in 2006, at once an homage to Brook and a brilliant reinvention of the play for a multicultural, globalized world.
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL BOYD, GREGORY DORAN, AND TIM SUPPLE
Michael Boyd, born in 1955, trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then worked at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry and the Sheffield Crucible before founding his own company, the Tron in Glasgow. He became an Associate Director of the RSC in 1996, coming to prominence with his millennial staging of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III in the company's "This England" cycle of history plays, which won him an Olivier award for Best Director. In 2003, he took over as Artistic Director, achieving a notable success in 2006-07 with his ambitious Complete Works Festival, whereby all Shakespeare's plays were staged in Stratford-upon-Avon over the course of a year, some by the RSC and others by visiting companies. His controversial Midsummer Night's Dream, with Josette Simon as Hippolyta/Titania and Daniel Ryan as Bottom, was staged in 1999.
Gregory Doran, born in 1958, studied at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic theater school. He began his career as an actor, before becoming Associate Director at the Nottingham Playhouse. He played some minor roles in the RSC ensemble before directing for the company, first as a freelance, then as Associate and subsequently Chief Associate Director. His productions, several of which have starred his partner Antony Sher, are characterized by extreme intelligence and lucidity. He has made a particular mark with several of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays and the revival of works by his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries. His 2005 Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC featured Amanda Harris as Titania, Joe Dixon as Oberon, Jonathan Slinger as the Puck, and Malcolm Storry as Bottom.
Tim Supple, born in 1963, studied at Cambridge University. As director of the Young Vic, he pioneered a style of theatrical narrative, often in the form of dramatizations of classic stories (such as Kipling's Jungle Book and a selection of tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses in the versions of Ted Hughes), that was simple and direct but also full of improvisation and innovative stage effect. He directed an RSC production of The Comedy of Errors on tour in India, which introduced him to Indian styles of theater, storytelling, and popular entertainment. This gave him the idea of recruiting an Indian company to play A Midsummer Night's Dream. The resulting production for his own company, Dash Arts (funded by the British Council), in a mixture of many Indian tongues as well as English, was a global triumph and a high point of the visiting work featured in the RSC 2006-07 Complete Works Festival.
A wood outside Athens where some very English artisans rehearse their amateur play. Theseus and Hippolyta jumping out of Greek mythology one moment and the English folklore figure of Robin Goodfellow the next. A production history that runs from the bare thrust stage of Shakespeare to elaborate Victorian scenography complete with trees and even live rabbits to Peter Brook's white cube with circus trapeze. How did you and your designer set about imagining and realizing the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Boyd: Tom Piper and I wanted to move from a cold oppressive world (with bad weather) to a much happier and more colorful place, via the comic and disturbing challenge of the wood. We were also very keen to thrust the action as far as possible into the same room as the audience while staying within the sightlines of the old Royal Shakespeare Theatre. What emerged was a smooth raised egg shape rising over the front of the stalls and enclosed by a seamless, seemingly doorless, curved wooden wall at the back of the curve. This closed off the proscenium, put pressure on the space, and also acted as a natural loudspeaker, thus enabling the actors to play freely with the whole range of their voices.
Athens was populated by gray, buttoned-up people in buttoned-up coats, and it snowed. Fur hats and a general air of frigid obedience gave an Eastern European feel to the opening scenes. Even the mechanicals wore identical gray suits, but it was Bottom's vitality and imagination that produced the first crack in this imposed closed order. He imagines and embodies the heroic gesture of "Hold or cut bow-strings" so vividly that his mimed Robin Hood longbow shoots a real arrow into the curved (Berlinesque) wall. The wall opens and a buttoned-up lady walks out of a door as poppies start to grow from the floor in a riot of red all over the stage. Color has arrived and Bottom runs away. The lady starts picking the poppies and is now being followed by the bowler-hatted, white-gloved Philostrate, who has also "escaped" through the hole in the wall. Philostrate harasses the woman in an increasingly sexual manner until they fight, rip each other's clothes apart, and reveal themselves to be Robin and Peaseblossom.
The world of the court now rapidly transforms, costumes morph and reveal highly colored l
inings. So the world of the fairies bursts out from within the oppressive world of the court, forming two highly charged teams of male and female. Oberon and his men/boys literally burst the floor open with their violent entrances through traps, further smashing the smooth ellipse and trapping Peaseblossom.
Doran: I suppose the first thing you have to acknowledge about the Dream is that there are three or four very distinct strata. I began by being aware that in order to create a fantastical world, I wanted to root the real world in a very specific and mundane reality. We began with the world of the rude mechanicals. They've got very specific jobs; there's a weaver, a carpenter, a bellows-mender, etc., and they work on Athenian stalls. They live under a very strict authority--if they frighten the ladies with the lion they think they will all be hanged, so it's not a cozy society. We wanted to make them real people. I think the problem for me in dressing them in Elizabethan or some sort of abstract costume is that you need a point of departure for the abstraction of the fairies, and you can make the mechanicals exotic by putting them in Elizabethan costume. I wanted them to be absolutely recognizable workingmen. I walked up and down Chapel Market in Islington and looked at the market stalls and the kind of people that worked there. It seemed to me that by making the mechanicals very ordinary, real people they would be funnier and the relationships between them more truthful.
From that point we had to leap off to find out what the world of the court was. In the court you find that the society run by Duke Theseus is again a very dangerous society, in which if girls don't obey their fathers they might be executed or be forced to join a convent. Whenever I come to direct a Shakespeare play, I try to read it as if for the first time, as if the ink is still wet on the page. You draw from that, without necessarily trying to tie everything up, all the various resonances that you can. Athens felt to me a bit like Greece under the Colonels, so I began to look at that as a reference point--a totalitarian dictatorship.
You have within that another whole strand with Duke Theseus. Shakespeare is like some great hydra. You manage to find a setting or locale or reality for one bit and then an extra head plops out and says "Well, you've forgotten me." By looking at the Theseus-Hippolyta story and seeing whether it married, we began to see Theseus as a normal, ordinary, upper-class aristocrat who plays out the fantasy that he has captured the Amazonian queen. It's the first bit of fantasy in the play. We began the play with a fight between two armed warriors, in Greek armor, crashing through an extraordinary sword-and-shield fight, which one of them then won. When the victor took off their helmet it turned out to be a woman. So you have the Amazonian warrior element of Hippolyta, and this time Theseus enjoyed being beaten by the warrior queen. Then they quickly got into their ordinary clothes for the arrival of Philostrate and Egeus. So there was a fantasy element in the role-playing that they were doing. I see very little other element of their, as it were, mythological status. When they are alone in Act 4 and start talking about being on a bear hunt with my kinsmen Hercules and Cadmus we decided that it was their own fantasy; again, to root them as real people in a real context, as the lovers were real people in a real context. It is more surprising if a fairy appears to somebody who is absolutely real and literal.
That was our starting point, and then the world of the forest became a sort of wasteland. When Shakespeare talks about forests we are in danger of thinking of pretty woodland glades, whereas I think what he is talking about is a wilderness into which people go and are changed by the experience. We created a rather sinister forest, which was a kind of forest and also a junk heap, with lots of detritus that had been chucked away by the world. The rude mechanicals brought a market stall into the forest which they were going to use as their little stage to rehearse, and a supermarket trolley to carry the props. And the fairies leapt from that.
Supple: Our approach was very practical at first: how do we suggest the journey from court to street to forest back to the street and then court? And how do we travel within the forest--how do we suggest different locations, experiences, emotions? And how, when we return to the court, can it feel different than it was? We discussed, sketched, and tried out many things in rehearsal but we were always heading for something light, simple, and suggestive. Something that could move and change with ease but with magical sensation. Before rehearsals began we had decided that the play should begin with a clean image--that the court should play on silk, and against a huge wall of white paper that would look like something classical and solid. We knew that we wanted to pull the silk off the floor, like a tablecloth, and play the street scene on earth. And we knew that we wanted the fairies to enter the play by bursting through the paper and that the torn back wall would suggest the lines and shape of the forest. We knew also that the gradual mess that would be created as the paper was ripped and trampled and the earth churned up during Acts 2 and 3 would naturally create the turbulence we felt to be at the heart of Shakespeare's forest. Indeed, we felt that the forest should transform from scene to scene with the shifting psychological experience of the characters and that we wanted this to be achieved by the simplest, playful means, with the fairies and Robin always central to how things change. The fairies' whirling sticks would create the dangerous war zone of 2.1; the fairies would climb and dance up silks and ropes to sing Titania to sleep in 2.2; the fairies provide a playful, benign forest for the mechanicals in 3.1 before Robin leads a vicious attack and the same forest turns into a nightmare. We knew that Act 4 would begin with the clean simplicity of dawn--all mess removed, while Act 5 would mark a return to silk but now red and rich and sensual. At all times we were aiming for a design that would open the audience's imagination while providing a concrete enough sense of each place and world--court, street, and forest; mortal and immortal. In rehearsal we were inspired by the place where we worked--Tamil Nadu. Our red earth, natural wooded grid, large leaves, and many other details came from there. In the costumes we worked hard to articulate three distinct worlds that would connect with the eternal folk play-within-the-play while resonating with a modern audience. The aristocrats' clothes trod a fine line between mythic dress and modern cloth; the mechanicals were always to be absolutely real--as one would find them on the streets of Calcutta; the fairies were most elusive for they had to be many things--playful, malign, light, potent--as they are Nature itself. The binding aesthetic was always India. It was not to be set in India but to arise from India: India as it was and as it is.
If the Chamberlain's Men's property store was like that of their rivals under Philip Henslowe, they might have had a wheel-on "bank" for Titania to lie upon, but meeting "by moonlight" in the outdoor Elizabethan theater could not have been achieved by fancy lighting effect. Where in your production did you rely most on modern theater technology and where did you just let the language and the audience's imagination do the work?
Boyd: We flew Bottom and Titania in the bed, we brought Oberon from the substage up to Titania's raised bed with phallic hydraulics, but this was a very simple production, which expressed itself in words, behavior, costume, and through [movement coach] Liz Ranken's sexually charged dance rituals.
Doran: I do think it is important to release the audience's imagination, to allow them to be complicit. In receiving the language they should not be too distracted. We did create a starlit sky. There was a puppet-theater technique we used. Snout had a stall where he was selling greasy hot dogs and falafel, an Athenian greasy spoon. The light on his frying dish was projected against the back wall of the mechanicals' market stall lock-up, so you got a sense of greasy onions and sausages, etc., projected against the back wall. We used that image but made it rather beautiful in the forest. Steve Tiplady, from Little Angel, by pouring ink and then oil into a Pyrex dish and then putting it onto an overhead projector, created a night sky. All the oil distributed into tiny bubbles, and when you projected that onto the screen you had an astonishing galaxy of stars, which looked absolutely like a night sky. All you then had to do was run your finger through the Py
rex dish and you got fantastic shooting stars. We allowed ourselves to use that, but you were always aware that it was "rough magic," if you like. And when you saw the fairies with their huge wings you knew that it was a shadow-play trick. So we did allow ourselves quite a lot of fun with that, but tried always to keep the actor and the spoken word at the forefront. We were probably not as rigorous as the way Peter Brook did it when he created the white box, but that was thirty or forty years ago, and I think bringing back a bit of theater magic, without it becoming a Victorian scene with white rabbits, could still create an image in the audience's mind of night and of the forest being a dangerous place.
We continued the sense of the fairies being obsessed with the adults. In the way that Titania and Oberon are obsessed with the changeling boy, the fairies themselves become obsessed with the lovers in the forest. They became the bushes and the briars through which the lovers scrambled. Basically they denuded the lovers as they went through the scene, by holding their clothes as they tore them off them. We thought hard about what a forest was and what it would be like going through a forest at night and we created that experience not with bushes and briars but by using the fairies. In the scene where Puck takes Demetrius and Lysander off to fight "cheek by jowl" we made the boys' trips through the forest quite difficult by giving them a lot of physical action to get through the groups of fairies, over the top of them and round about them.
4. Tim Supple's wood: behind, the bamboo frame through which the fairies burst; around, the twine with which Robin entangled the lovers.
With such a huge space, particularly in a proscenium arch, you have to fill that picture frame in some way. You can do it with lights and things other than just physical lumps of scenery. We didn't have very much scenery. Effectively we just kept the space clear and allowed the actors to fill that space. I did have a large globe moon, which was a very interesting element. As soon as we put a moon on the stage, we followed the stages of the moon through the play and realized that something very strange is going on. Hippolyta at the beginning says that in four days' time the moon will be like "a silver bow New-bent in heaven," talking about the transitional phases of the moon--there is going to be a new moon in four days' time, but until then no moon. But Lysander seems to think there will be a moon "Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass"; and then as soon as we are in the forest Oberon says "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania," so instead of there being no moon at all, as is the case in the first scene, suddenly there is a moon. Either Shakespeare is not being literal or he's being very precise, and people have worked out exactly what that means. The moon to us presided over the play. In fact it moved during the show and was lit in different ways, just as the physical globe of the moon is always there in the sky but is lit from different angles by the sun. We lit it in very different ways during the piece, and then allowed it to blossom into this huge flower which provided the final antidote to the love-in-idleness: "Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower / Hath such force and blessed power": so we were following through a large abstract idea of the moon and chastity and also its relationship to sex and fecundity. I think that is a key link.
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