What Dreams May Come Outside

Thoughts on Shakespeare
The National Post

Summer is the season of Shakespeare in the park, wherein nature provides the scenery, the lighting and much of the atmosphere.

They call it The Dream in High Park even when, as this year, the play happens to be Twelfth Night. For many people there is only one legitimate open-air Shakespeare, and all others are pretenders. An actor friend who in the 1960s played two seasons at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London told me that patrons, usually American, would call up and ask if A Midsummer Night's Dream was playing that night. Told that it wasn't even playing that year, they remained undeterred; couldn't you, they would plead, do it tonight anyway?

Because it has fairies, and a team of accident-prone rustics putting on a play, A Midsummer Night's Dream has an undeserved reputation for innocuousness. It's the play of choice for introducing children to Shakespeare, and outdoor presentation -- a pretty setting for a pretty text -- seems to go along with that. Also, outdoor theatres tend to be cheaper to attend than indoor ones (The Dream in High Park is free, although there is a suggested $15 donation), so taking the family is an easier proposition.

Shakespeare's own theatre, the Globe, was, of course, an open- air theatre, though urban rather than vernal. The roofless Elizabethan playhouses were modelled on bustling inn-yards, not on quiet parklands. Ironically, A Midsummer Night's Dream may originally have been one of Shakespeare's few indoor plays. There's evidence it was written as a celebration for an aristocratic wedding, to be performed in the banquet hall after supper (just like the plays of the artisans “Pyramus and Thisbe” is, within the play itself). Doubtless it had an afterlife on the public stage, but neither venue would have allowed for real trees, which are the selling point for modern alfresco Dreams: "a wood near Athens," with real wood.

The other plays in the open-air Shakespeare canon are there for similarly literal reasons: Twelfth Night (the runner-up, set largely in a countess' garden), As You Like It (a forest) and The Tempest (a desert island). These are also, of course, well-known comedies with wholesome auras.

Then there is Love's Labour's Lost, which happens entirely in a royal park and is the premier pastoral play in the language, but it's regarded as obscure, and so counts as a risk. As also, in this context, do all other Shakespeare plays, and anything written at any time by any other playwright whatsoever. Canadian theatres, to their credit, often take such chances.

Actually, doing any play in the open air is risky, and what is at risk is, in all senses, concentration. I'm not referring to the trivial distractions, such as airplanes and mosquitoes. I mean that plays in parks are, of their nature, very difficult to focus.

I now propose to get autobiographical. In my youth, I was involved in two open-air Shakespeare shows. At 15, I played Fabian (encouragingly described in the text we used as "this unnecessary character") in a school production of Twelfth Night. It was done in a garden, but, most important, it was done in front of a house. Having that unifying facade to act in front of, and to walk in and out of, was a great help.

It was a golden English summer, and everybody, actors and audience, felt enchanted. Our Malvolio grew up to be a playwright, while at the other end of the cast, furniture was moved about by half-a-dozen 12-year-old pages, one of whom was called Alan Rickman. I would like to say that his talent was immediately recognized by his seniors in the cast, but it wasn't.

Some 20 years later, the three of us -- Malvolio, Rickman and I - - were fortuitously reunited at a theatre reception. I doubt if any other old school production, or indeed any other old school, was as well represented. Malvolio was married by now to an actress, a very good one, and he tried to explain to her what it had been like.

"Well," he said, "there was Peter Brook's Dream, and there was Twelfth Night." He was probably right.

My other memory is less happy. Some half dozen years later, I directed a troupe of Cambridge undergraduates in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at, of all places, Stratford-on-Avon. (Talk about coals to Newcastle.) One of the local hotels had fostered a legend that the play had first been performed under a spreading oak tree on what were now the hotel grounds.

It seems doubtful to me that Stratford would ever have been a touring date for the Globe company. Will himself, who had left home in order to leave home, would not have been keen -- and, anyway, somebody pointed out that the strain of oak in question was introduced into England a century after Shakespeare's death. But the management kept their tradition going for a couple of years.

Oxford had brought a production the previous year. Now it was our turn. We didn't do a good job, or at least I didn't. The play, performed all over a sprawling greensward, had no particular identity. Also, this was one of England's less golden summers, and my memory is that it rained every night. The audience was under cover, but the actors weren't. One night, the downpour was so torrential that the performance was adjourned after half- an-hour to a rehearsal tent, the cast pretty much making up the moves as they went along. Also, they didn't have to shout, and the play suddenly acquired intimacy and a shape. I was converted on the spot to the idea of the Dream as nuptial cabaret.

Even out in the wilderness, I'd observed that the second half of the play, after darkness had fallen, was much better than the first. This led me, when reviewing some professional park show years later, to refer to "the blessing of night that falls upon the just and the unjust open-air production alike." It's impossible to resist. And, of course, when the natural lights go out, you bring on the artificial ones, and with them you can be selective. The play ceases to be flat and acquires contours.

What we call interpretation is largely a matter of lighting. Shakespeare's audience, who got the plays fresh, may not have needed it, but we, who often know them too well, need the help. Shakespeare himself, in his later years, must have discovered this when his company opened a candlelit indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, which took more money (partly because it charged more) than the Globe ever had. This, by the way, is the space for which that other supernatural favourite, The Tempest, was first designed.

Not that I don't have pleasant open-air memories as a spectator. I saw my very first Dream as a kid, in Regent's Park, and very delightful in a solidly old-fashioned way it was. The following year, I saw a comedy there called The Romanticks, by the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, about a pair of self-elected star-crossed lovers whose parents had to push them together rather than pull them apart. If the title and the theme sound familiar, that's because the play later became the source of the musical The Fantasticks, which was to run some 40 years off- Broadway. I must be one of the few people who has seen the play but not the show.

Regent's Park standards in those days were thought to be pretty tatty, but they were spruced up circa 1960, largely by a future director of Canada's Stratford, David William. Stratford's current director, Richard Monette, also has a Park past. I got my first glimpse of him when, a temporary expatriate, he played Lorenzo there in The Merchant of Venice. (His Jessica, coincidentally, was the future Mrs. Malvolio, referred to above.) Last time I went, Judi Dench was there, directing The Boys From Syracuse. Regent's Park, like other classical theatres, has succumbed to the lure of the musical.

It's also got far more architectural, and more fenced-off, since the days when God painted the scenery. High Park, too, goes in increasingly for built-up sets. But spaces with natural features beyond the regulation greenwood are at a huge advantage. I am regularly bewitched by the lakeside setting of Oakville's Coronation Park, which confers a benefit on any director who cares to use it, and where the sight of people on the distant horizon who may or may not prove to be part of the play is its own added attraction.

Far less decorative, but almost equally spacious, is Withrow Park, where Shakespeare in the Rough has evolved a style that has benefited such unlikely choices as Othello and Measure for Measure. They use the outlying space to fill in the characters' biographies between the written scenes. It's almost like getting two plays.

Maybe the ideal parkland theatre is Britain's Glyndebourne Opera House, where you experience the show indoors, with perfect acoustics, and then picnic between the acts. It's getting the best of both worlds. Pastoral -- what the poet Marvell wonderfully evoked as "a green thought in a green shade" -- is a marvellously seductive form, from the Renaissance to Into the Woods -- but it isn't a realistic one, and natural scenery may be contrary to its nature. Besides that, I'm pampered, and I doubt if the outdoor experience can ever be ideal for a play. But it can undoubtedly be fun.