A Midsummer Night's Dream (22 page)

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 Pyrex 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 blessèd 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.

5.
Titania (Josette Simon) and Bottom (Daniel Ryan) in Michael Boyd's sexually charged RSC production.

Supple:
Our only use of modern technology is in the lighting—which is very important to the production—and in the microphones that lift the levels of our live musical instruments to fill the large theaters in which we play. On the other hand, we never rely simply on language and the audience's imagination alone. However minimal, there is always some intervention from the set, the light, or the music to help define a moment. There is a very interesting way in which the most traditional theater practice—still alive in India today—meets with contemporary imaginative theater approaches in the West. In our production a limited set of resources—musical instruments played live, or sticks, rope, silks, and elastic, or even a rubber tire—have provided limitless possibilities of imaginative play. In a way, we are trying to combine the playfulness and freedom of children with the refined, layered sophistication of the wisdom and experience found in the text. In 3.2, when the four lovers dissolve into a deadly fight of jealous rivalry, our Puck gleefully weaves a web of elastic around them in which they become entangled and flail to the point of desperation. This is certainly an addition to the language and a stimulant to the audience's imagination. It suggests another shape to the forest floor, but it also plays a very simple trick on the lovers—one that a child could conceive of, but that also plays with their entangled love with the force of Cupid. This is in fact what the
mechanicals themselves discover in 3.1: how do you “bring the moonlight into a chamber”? You get a man to suggest moonshine with a torch and bush! Ingenious, playful, and symbolic.

In what sense was your Hippolyta an Amazonian captive? And how seriously did you take Oberon's assertion that Theseus (led on by Titania) is a serial rapist?

Boyd:
Josette Simon has great beauty and dignity and was dressed elegantly as Hippolyta, but chastely. She and Oberon stood far apart as their forthcoming wedding was announced to choreographed applause. Disharmony lay beneath the optimistic rhetoric in the summer snow.

Doran:
We felt Theseus was actually a very ordinary man who had this fantasy. Oberon and Titania see them in mythological terms as fantasies that they want to play out. Oberon's description seems to have no relationship to Theseus at all. Theseus himself has a very strange attitude to any kind of imaginative capacity, finding it all a bit suspicious. It seemed to us that that was Oberon and Titania creating a sort of mythological context for the play. I think you could see in my production that there is a relationship to that myth, but that it was another layer of fantasy. I don't think it helps to see Theseus as a serial rapist.

Supple:
Shakespeare is enigmatic, or very open, about both Hippolyta and Theseus. Who knows how much this was deliberate or the mark of unfinished work? But the most interesting approach is to assume that it was deliberate and, rather than fixing the nature of Hippolyta's captivity or Theseus' character, leave it as open as possible. We know that they have fought and that Theseus has won and we know that they get married. We don't know how Hippolyta feels about this. Her first words are ambiguous and could be convincingly played as both willing compliance and biting resentment. When decisions have to made, we tried to make just enough to bring a story to life and to create the sense of journey and change that all good stories need. In our production, Hippolyta has lost a war,
agreed to marry, but has no love for Theseus. An Amazonian queen, she has no voice in Athens' court. Her journey is to come to terms with the situation she is in: his journey is to win her love—not through conquest or through spectacle. This occurs in 4.1 when his flexibility leads him to champion the young lovers over Egeus and the law. What has occurred to bring about this change? We know nothing about Theseus and Hippolyta after 1.1. The process of change is surely to be found in the forest. Titania and Oberon are the continuation of the battle between Hippolyta and Theseus and their turbulent, ferocious fight over marital power, sexual ownership, a child, and the world that they are responsible for is the dream-catharsis that exorcises and resolves the buried issues and frustrations between the two mortal monarchs. We have to take everything that one character says about another seriously, while remembering that it is only the perspective of one character. We would not be surprised if Theseus was a rapist—surely this is common to many powerful figures of myth? But we would not be surprised if Oberon is exaggerating in his jealousy and anger. What we can assume is that Theseus has yet to learn love in its tender, thoughtful, selfless sense. He must make the journey from absolute monarch-soldier who wins his wife on the battlefield to a man who knows love. He is given this by Oberon and Titania, who sit beautifully poised between two modern notions, being both alter egos and spirit-gods of love.

What's going on with all that business in which Oberon and Titania fight over the Indian boy? Some productions actually include the boy in the cast …

Boyd:
In my Crucible production the boy was played by Mumta Gupta, the gorgeous son of Nirmal Gupta, who ran by far the best curry house in Sheffield and loved the snooker. We had no onstage boy in Stratford, but his unconscious root might be the Child Christ whose mother the Virgin Mary has been so recently banished from English spirituality. Titania's account of disharmony has strong suggestions of an England out of joint following the Reformation.

Doran:
[
See Doran's answer to the question about the fairies
,
this page
.]

Supple:
Again, this is an enigmatic, or open, aspect of the play and one can either explain it clearly or leave it open. We chose the latter while never forgetting that it is at the heart of what they are arguing about and so must be essential to their very beings. We are told by Puck that Oberon wants the boy to be a special member of his followers—a scout or ranger. We can imagine that a little mortal child would be as special to a spirit as a spirit-child would be to a mortal. But it is hard to believe that this is all such a terrible fight is about. In the argument between them in 2.1 we can surmise that Oberon is furious that his request is being denied, and perhaps the boy has become a symbol of the love and sexual partnership that she is denying him. “Am not I thy lord?!” he thunders when she tries to leave his company again. Is the boy the battleground for marital power within which sexual availability and fidelity is the real issue? This is possible, but does not feel quite deep or rich enough to enter the bloodstream of such a play of wonderful humanity. It is striking what emerges in Titania's speech when she is pushed. The boy is a child of a woman who loved her and with whom she shared tenderness, humor, and friendship. The woman died, and for her sake Titania has made the boy her own. Is the potent issue here the fact that, being immortals, Titania and Oberon cannot have children? In a play in which all the characters yearn to be other than they are, is it Titania and Oberon's yearning to have a child, to be a family? This is not so fanciful: at the end of the play they come to the marriage beds to bless the sexual union of the three couples and the children that they will have. If the ending requires some profound union between all the characters of the play, this might indeed make a deep connection between the immortal and mortal worlds. One of the toughest challenges presented by the boy in the play is simply to make it clear—a common phrase one hears from audiences at productions of the
Dream
is: “What exactly are Oberon and Titania fighting about?” It can be useful and interesting to have the boy in the show, as we do, to help establish the character firmly in the story. However, even this cannot make the argument easily clear to
all watching. Perhaps, like all marriages, the exact issue in a falling-out can never be clear to outsiders. Or perhaps the most important clue is in the mystery itself. A great concern of the play is the mystery of the immortal or spirit world. We yearn to touch it. In love and art (theater) we can glimpse it, but it will remain a mystery. A dream.