Fairy-Tale Time
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The National Theatre
The Observer
The band strikes up ‘If It Wasn't for the Houses in Between,’ and we wonder what that has to do with a wood near Athens, or near anywhere else. It then segues into ‘Lily of Laguna,’ which is even more bemusing, and finally settles on ‘Beautiful Dreamer,’ which makes sense.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is, if anything is, the great English folk play. Its fairies are a compendium of Elizabethan lore on the homelier supernatural. I had expected Bill Bryden, whose productions at the Cottesloe are generally historically-minded, to explore the plays Elizabethan-ness. In fact, as may be gauged from that opening medley, he places us on the cusp of Victorian and Edwardian. The mechanicals might be the Lark Rise and Candleford Dramatic Society. The lovers are out of Jerome K. Jerome.
Theseus signals the onset of holiday by throwing his bonnet over the windmill, or at least his boater into the audience. Only the grey-green fairies transcend the period. They might come from a nineteenth-century picture book, but they could equally come from a sixteenth-century one. They are free, and in control.
This production’s great concern, the great excitement, is to bring the play’s levels together, and yet keep them as tantalizingly apart. The fairies are everywhere, overseeing the mortals from every level of stage and auditorium. They bring on the light that mark out the mechanicals’ acting area. Oberon and Titania come face-to-face with an unseeing Theseus and Hippolyta: a more powerful moment than can be produced by the now orthodox doubling of roles. When the fairies perform their dance of blessing at the end, the mortals return to do their own concentric routine.
The key line might be Puck’s “I'll be an auditor; an actor too perhaps.” When he and Oberon watch the lovers, when Theseus and Hippolyta watch the play, they sit with us. The audience, in a modified form of promenade staging, constitute the place fourth estate; we too participate and we become part of the party at the finale when Puck’s “give me your hands” becomes the cue for handshakes all around.
Actually I suspect the line just means “please applaud” and I also suspect that the “general harmony” interpretation of the play is getting overdone. The different worlds brush, but they do not collide; only Bottom actually meets Titania (and cannot believe it afterwards), while he and his friends are dismissed by the duke before the end. We are in danger of underrating the elusiveness of this play; I was longing for Puck to shake just one hand, and disappear. if we are to participate, this is as close as we should get.
Which is not to deny the delight of what Mr. Bryden has actually achieved. It still lacks overall rhythm, and there were moments on the first night when it came to an abrupt and puzzling halt, sometimes in the middle of a line. Paul Schofield as Oberon seemed occasionally overcome by the power of his own words: pardonably, since his grizzled, solicitous, sonorous and quietly self-mocking Oberon could raise some very potent Spirits.
Susan Fleetwood’s sensuous Titania matches him (their quarrel carries unusual weight) and Jack Shepherd knows exactly how to hush the theatre as Puck. Edna Doré, a dewdrop-bearing drudge, admirably rounds out the immortals. The clowns are led by Derek Newark's quietly self-confident Bottom and include a Snout by Tony Haygarth, who, as Wall, drops delightful bricks. The Bergomask is done, with superb devotion, as a four-man sand-dance: Wilson, Keppel, Betty and Friend.
The upper class ladies—especially Marsha Hunt’s Hippolyta and Bernadette Shortt’s Hermia - are cowed by the verse, though Jennifer Hall as Helena has some nice vignettes of self-pity. The men are stronger, with Edward de Souza a jovially seigniorial Theseus (who actually thinks his way through “the lunatic, the lover and the poet”), David Rintoul a down-the-line juvenile Demetrius, and Karl Johnson's Lysander emerging, unprecedentedly, as the sharpest character in the peace: a priggishly ardent young man who gives lectures on the course of true love, and carefully arranges flowers for his pillow before sinking in a trance.
At its multi-levelled best, this production makes Pirandello look a bit sick, as of course does the play. I preferred it though of course I don't dare say so, to Peter Brook’s.