From our resident critic:
How bizarre it is that some of Shakespeare’s plays have long been labelled “problem plays” – bizarre because all Shakespeare plays are problematic, because one can’t help feeling that it was the problem that attracted him to the subject matter in the first place. The notion of twenty years passing between two acts; of a shrew being tamed; of young men swearing to abjure love while they pursue their studies; of a woman waking to find herself beside a decapitated corpse that seems to be her husband’s…. These were among the many problems that stimulated Shakespeare’s imagination.
In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, his particular feat is to show how three different societies coexist – that of the rude mechanicals (Bottom the Weaver above all), that of Athenian high society (Duke Theseus, his bride Hippolyta, and the young lovers Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius), and that of the fairies (Oberon, Titania, Puck, and others). But he also addressed a problem we today find more disturbing than his own Elizabethan audience probably did in 1598: the idea of a husband drugging his wife with an aphrodisiac to humiliate her, so that she may become the amorous and sexual companion of some unfamiliar and loathsome being (“Wake when some vile thing is near”). Shakespeare treats it as high comedy, and yet we can see why Titania’s bestialist experience with Bottom the ass ought to seem more troubling than any of the taming tactics whereby Petruchio teaches his shrew wife Katharina to conform. It was brilliant of Nicholas Hytner in his 2019 Bridge Theatre production of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer” to give Oberon and Titania each other’s lines and actions – so that it’s Titania who drugs and humiliates Oberon, giving him the joys of gay sex with Bottom – and making it joyously funny. Very few words are altered: when Puck calls “My master with a monster is in love!”, it’s hard even for a Shakespearean purist (I can be one) to object.
But this is just one of the glories of this production, which has now been revived. The Bridge Theatre – commissioned and planned by Hytner (it has been open since 2017) – is itself a glory. It has two upper tiers and can be variously reconfigured. (Its very floor becomes an array of surfaces that rise and fall.) This, in turn, has released a greater mastery of three-dimensional space than Hytner used to reveal even when he regularly staged plays in the Olivier Theatre (the largest of the National Theatre’s spaces). The late Michael Boyd (1955-2023), artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, had what seemed a unique genius for making Shakespeare fly up and out in three spatial dimensions – but Hytner’s work at the Bridge, above all in this “Midsummer”, shows that this kind of genius was not unique to Boyd. It is already fabulously hilarious to see Oberon sporting in a bubble bath with Bottom – but here a large part of the marvel is that the bath is floating high in the air above us. Puck and other fairies here become poetic athletes, spinning, stretching, and balancing on gorgeous trapezes.
As designed by Bunny Christie, the forest is partly composed of old bedsteads that become tunnels, barriers, thickets, obstacle courses. When finally Puck (David Moorst, returning from the original 2019 production) ushers Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius to lie in sleep, side by side, on the same mattress, it’s especially satisfying: beds have been part of the imagery here all along. And then this mattress, with its four sleeping human lovers, slowly ascends high above the action – another of the production’s haunting images.
Back in the 1980s, Hytner led the way into staging Shakespeare, Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”, and West End musicals with black players sharing lead roles with white ones. After some thirty-seven years of this, we need hardly remark on the multiracial composition of Hytner’s “Midsummer” cast, and yet we can bet that this, for the whole audience, is a part of the delight here. (It’s a big hit, ending like a party in which cast and audience celebrate together.) JJ Feild (Oberon and Theseus) and Susannah Fielding (Titania and Hippolyta) are white, but their leading courtier Egeus (David Webber), his daughter Hermia (Nina Cassells), and beloved Bottom the Weaver (Emanuel Akwafo) are black. So, although casting here is not racially schematic, there’s still a comic frisson to be had from watching white Oberon and black Bottom in that erotic bubble bath together. I note that Lysander seems to be very nearly the first professional role played by Divesh Subaskaran, who strikes me as outstanding amid an entirely admirable and enjoyable cast:
Hytner has been one of our great Shakespeare directors since the 1980s. He’s not one of those who insist on having his actors pronounce “derision” with four syllables or “revenue” with the stress on the middle syllable – though I have known both work, as they still do in Benjamin Britten’s enduringly eloquent opera of this play – but he does have them, often enough, reveal the iambic pulse within the verse. And the language becomes part of the joy here, though the actors never speak it as if it were special – their purposes are communication and character but not musicality or sonority. For my companion for the Thursday press night, this was his first experience of any Shakespeare play. It not only thrilled him, it made him eager now to discover the more serious Shakespeare dramas too.
A strange feature of Shakespeare’s plays is that it is often the early ones where the language is relatively weak that usually prove highly robust in performance. (“Two Gentlemen of Verona” is relatively feeble to read, but I’ve experienced four quite unalike productions that were all vivid and engraossing in performance.) The plays we tend to call “greater” are much riskier affairs – “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, fail as often as they succeed.
The exception, however, is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. It’s always been seen as a great play, and yet it always works (though sometimes one needs to add “, eventually). It’s vintage comedy with heartbreak and rage combined, it contains plenty of high poetry, and it’s a miraculous meeting of separate societies. What’s more, it has inspired two truly great and stylistically contrasting ballets (George Balanchine’s two-act “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and Frederick Ashton’s one-act “The Dream”) and Britten’s sometimes enchanting and always enduring opera. I came too late to see such legendary productions of the play as those by Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook, but I hope I never forget Boyd’s 1999 RSC staging. Now, in Hytner’s 2019-2025 production, we have another classic – and rejuvenating – account of this evergreen play.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is at the Bridge Theatre until August 20.
The post Alastair Macaulay reviews a Shakespeare problem play appeared first on Slippedisc.
