A Midsummer Night's Dream (19 page)

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.

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 clichés 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:

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 operating 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:

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 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

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:

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.

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

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,

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
,