A Midsummer Night's Dream Read online

  Similarly with Titania and Oberon, we needed to make sure that there was a real battle going on over the changeling boy, and a real sense of deep loss. It seems as though they can both have sex with human beings, but they can never have children. So the obsession with the changeling boy we thought was a very real obsession. Because I really wanted to focus attention on the changeling boy and his appeal to them, we made a Bunraku puppet of a lifesize toddler. If you want to have the changeling boy on the stage, children are immensely distracting. Even if they are good you still think they might fall over. Certainly what you couldn't do is have a child as young as the changeling boy is clearly meant to be. His mother, it seems, has only recently given birth. We wanted the child to have a presence and we decided that by having a puppet, somehow the fairies would appear real and the puppet a mortal.

  That introduced a whole other element in the play, which was an element of fantasy. I developed a relationship with the Little Angel Theatre, having done Venus and Adonis with them, and they provided a very special magic. There were two elements of that. One was that I noticed how often the word "shadow" is used in the play, and so felt shadow play might be a fascinating element. We all know from shining a torch against your hand as a child and it making a great big scary shadow on the bedroom ceiling, that shadows can create huge and extraordinary things. Once we had worked out that language it allowed us, when the fairies first appear and are gathering the dewdrops, to have fairies with huge Arthur Rackham wings, who were absolutely the sort of fairies that we immediately think of as fairies. The fairies from the Conan Doyle hoax. We were able to have fairies with great big wings and then undermine that. They could present themselves in your imagination but then they could be very real too.

  I was very interested by Shakespeare's use of scale. Apparently the fairies can crawl into an acorn cup, but then Titania can have sex with a human being, so there's a variety of scale there. We spent quite a lot of time looking at those extraordinary Victorian fairy paintings; the mad, rather disturbing ones of Richard Dadd; the Irish painter Daniel Maclise's extraordinary paintings; and the famous fairy paintings by Fuseli and Noel Paton. We looked at how painters can easily enjoy that variety of scale. There are paintings of fairies fighting with owls and bats on a monster scale. We wanted to play with that. The shadow element helped with that, as did the use of dolls. I remember finding a sack of my sisters' old dolls when we were clearing out while moving house, and the dolls had lost their hair and eyes; they were weird-looking things. I showed them to my sisters and they were repelled by them. They found them rather disturbing; these creatures that they had loved and that had become real for them as children were now these ghastly monsters. When Bottom was attended by the fairies they all had these dreadful old dolls, which they presented to him so that the fairies could land on his hand. I used them as if the fairies were invisible unless they showed the dolls. We played with the iconic idea of the fairy, and then we subverted that into something else.

  We did want to make real the way that the dissension between Oberon and Titania has apparently turned the world upside down. So the rude mechanicals were constantly running through the rain. The seasons have altered. The world is uncannily changed. The "forgeries of jealousy" speech seems to suggest global warming. There seems to be this terrifying prospect that the world has been somehow damaged and is out of kilter, and the weather itself is changing. We wanted to utilize that to get away from the sense of the forest as a twinkly, starry place.

  Supple: We found the fairies the hardest characters to costume and tried several versions before the final costumes were created during the night between the dress rehearsal and opening performance in Delhi. But we never found them hard to play. We wanted to avoid all stylization and all decisions of one overall tone. We wanted the fairies to be as unpredictable as nature itself and free from all human psychology--especially restraint, morality, tactical thinking, guilt, responsibility, etc. We wanted creatures of pure action. In part they are distant cousins of Harlequin, always playful, and in part they are purely physical forces like dancers or acrobats. How they are comes from what they do. In 2.1 they fight like vicious insects; in 2.2 they magically bind Titania's lair with a spell to keep her at peace and asleep, then wrap Hermia and Lysander into their own chrysalis of sleep. In 3.1 they playfully provide a benign forest for the mechanicals made up of cane and cloth leaves and of fans and mops and nets. With Puck, they enjoy watching these strange mortals rehearse their play and then, like vicious children, they turn on the mechanicals and drive them mad by chasing them, a screeching assault, out of the forest. At Titania's demand, they attend to the new king of the fairies--Bottom, tying him up like Gulliver and leading him off to his lover's bed at the end of 3.1 in a wild bacchanalian dance. We wanted them to have the quality of Ovid's nymphs: immortal yet servile, free of all constraint yet shot through with an ultimate tragic sense that we see but they cannot. Like insects that live for a day, they have no awareness of what they are missing, or how lucky they are.

  We felt that no single image or costume or characterization could encapsulate all this. We had to leave the performer's body and the audiences' minds free to imagine and enjoy. Like Brook and his designer, Sally Jacobs, we chose to let them be performers. Only the performer him/herself, we felt, could be this thing and indeed the nearest we humans can get to these spirits is in performance. The trickery, the playfulness, the athleticism, the skill, the immaturity, the exotic wisdom, the viciousness, the delightfulness, the tenderness, the glimpse of immortality that will never last--all this is touched best by the performer. So our fairies wear as few clothes as possible, all black: beautiful, simple clothes of performance that best suit their bodies and expose as much of their bodies as possible. Flesh and muscle, legs, backs, and arms: these are the key elements of our shadows' costume.

  So, do you believe in fairies? More seriously, although this is traditionally the Shakespeare play that has the best chance of making children fall in love with Shakespeare in the theater (was it like that for you?), some astute critics increasingly feel that it is a--perhaps the--central Shakespearean play, because it is such a profound exploration of theater as dream, dream as theater ... the ultimate embodiment of Coleridge's great remark about "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

  Boyd: The poetic faith of Bottom was at the center of our production, or at least our lantern through the forest of our expressed desires and fears and hates.

  Doran: The reason I enjoyed the elements of Puck and the mask and the shadow play is because, as an audience, you know how the effect is being produced, but you are still amazed by it. If you could do extraordinary technological things, that wouldn't be as surprising. You would just be rather unemotionally engaged in the trickery. Whereas if you bring the audience in, and allow their imaginations to fly with what's happening in the play, I think it is the most wonderful act of theater, because the play happens somewhere between the actor's imagination and the audience's imagination. It's that complicity which I think makes it such a special and such a blessed play. It is a great benediction.

  7. Bottom (Malcolm Storry) in Gregory Doran's shopping trolley, with puppet fairies.

  It was surprising in many ways to us. Midsummer meant to the Elizabethans something very different to what it means to us today. To us it means Pimms, Wimbledon, long summer evenings, and that sense of relaxation. To the Elizabethans it was a precarious time, when the crops were in the ground but the harvest hadn't arrived. If the weather was bad at that time it could spell disaster, because if the crops failed shortages could lead to all kinds of rural discontent. It was a dangerous time. It was also a time of year when a portal opened between two worlds, and between Midsummer (St. John's Eve) and the feast of St. Peter the Apostle (23-29 June) was a time when fairies were supposed to be active. So there was a genuine sense of concern at that time. A Midsummer Night's Dream to a modern audience sounds a time of relaxation and conten
tment. In Elizabethan terms it doesn't have quite those connotations of beauty and relaxation and ease. In approaching the play right from the start we began to realize that there were more things going on, and that they were of serious import.

  Supple: The Dream is, for me, too, the essential expression of Shakespeare's theater. Playfully profound and profoundly playful; one foot in the ancient theater and one foot marching toward the modern theater; narratively exhilarating with time for no less than four major set pieces of song and dance; perfectly constructed; a canvas of characters that range from the highest aristocrat to a tinker, with characters drawn in meticulous detail or magnificent generality, as befits the needs of the drama. And in the center, the great invention of the fairies: immortals who are most like us. Ultimately the play shatters in its ability to draw all these elements together in an ending as central to the human experience as any work of theater that I know of or can imagine.

  SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER

  IN THE THEATER

  BEGINNINGS

  William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

  Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

  Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

  He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly-paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

  The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare's career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

  As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

  For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the "honey-flowing vein" of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593-94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

  PLAYHOUSES

  Elizabethan playhouses were "thrust" or "one-room" theaters. To understand Shakespeare's original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium-arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary "fourth wall" framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world--especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience was always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same "room" as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.

  Shakespeare's theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.

  At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter
was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.

  The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three thousand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other "public" playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars Theatre that Shakespeare's company began using in 1608--formerly the refectory of a monastery--had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity, probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or "private" audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at court as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a "chamber" style in his last plays--which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.