A Midsummer Night's Dream (20 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sirine Saba, Philostrate's side-kick in the court scenes, came on in her white gloves, fur hat, and spectacles. Philostrate appeared in the doorway behind her as she bent down—ostensibly to pick
a flower, but somehow in a rather suggestive manner. Philostrate would then stalk her down the stage … he would catch her up and … be right behind her the next time she bent down. Philostrate had had an idiosyncratic little gesture, in the court scene, of stepping forward and rocking on his heels. This movement behind a girl bending down was, obviously, very sexual … She would then turn, and slap me across the face. I would … then remove her hat, pull off its ear-flaps and throw it away. She would … then remove my glasses and break the arms off … take off my bowler hat, spit in it, and throw them all into the wings. Things would then escalate … until we would be ripping the clothes off each other with frenzied energy. This was followed by energetic kissing, the fierceness of the love/hate relationship descending rapidly into pure sexuality. She would then run away in a very coy, teasing manner, which was the cue for the first line of the scene: “How now, spirit, whither wander you?” … the scene became directly about desire and passion—everything they had both been repressing at court.
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In sleep we have a reversion to a more primitive type of experience … The dream becomes a revelation. It strips the ego of its artificial wrappings and exposes it in its native nudity. It brings up from the dim depths of our sub-conscious life the primal, instinctive impulses, and discloses to us a side of ourselves which connects us with the great sentient world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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