A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
Royal Shakespeare Company
Festival Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell.
It may take forty minutes for Puck to put a girdle round the earth but it takes the RSC a little longer. It is ten years since we saw Anthony Sher’s Richard III and a lot longer back to Peter Brook’s legendary Dream. Now, boosted by a British Council celebrating its jubilee, the RSC returns like an infrequent comet, bringing with it a considerable reputation and all the expectations of its imprimatur.
Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect the RSC to soar to ever new heights, especially since directors such as Jim Sharman, Neil Armfield, Gale Edwards and Simon Phillips have, through our own State Theatre Company, set enviable standards of excellence and originality in Shakespearean production. Certainly, after years of cringe, it is clear that the playing field is now very much on the level. Whatever the case, this particular RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , has turned out to be a rather ordinary snooze, dependent on a fetching but unresonant decor and a surprisingly reticent reading of the text.
It is central to presenting the Dream that you know what to do with the faery world. Peter Brook, in his landmark reading, banished all that Rackham kitsch and the romantic excess of Mendelssohn, replacing it with acid circus and seventies erotics. Other productions followed, not least, Elisha Moshinsky’s darkly polymorphous BBC version, as well as spirited local successes like Jim Sharman’s Lighthouse Dream with Geoffrey Rush as Oberon and John Wood in the role of Bottom.
This time, director Adrian Noble has left the evocation of the Oberon -Titania world to the designer Anthony Ward, who quotes Sally Jacobs’ white box from the Brook version, but plasters it with strong washes of colour – scarlets, purples and greens. The swings onstage in the opening scene hint at the Brook trapezes, but Ward’s signatures are differently distinct. They consist of a series of disappearing and hydraulic doorways (neatly indicating when the narrative steps between worlds), a night sky backdrop of oversized suspended lightbulbs and an array of parachuting umbrellas. They are strong images -and make for the ready cloning of productions for global consumption. But despite their wit, the umbrellas create a whimsy closer to Bedknobs and Broomsticks, J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan and that wretched Disney Tinkerbell, than to the complex satire on the infatuations and treacheries of love that the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers.
Doubling as Theseus and Hippolyta and Oberon and Titania, Leigh Lawson and Amanda Harris give us little of the sexual rivalry and amorality of the faery realm. Harris, doing a dumb blonde variant on Rita Hayworth, is got up in a semiotically scarlet dress while Lawson tries out a curious new interpretation of Oberon- playing him as if he were Sir Peter Hall. Oberon’s relationship to Puck -played by Peter Hughes, alternating between exruciating jollity and inscrutable unpleasantness- lacks coherence and theatrical interest. The moment when Oberon chastises Puck, by pulling a hair from his goatish backside, is a notably idiotic display of misplaced burlesque. And it is also in these netherworld scenes that Ward’s set seems least hospitable. The decision to have Oberon function in the action as a kind of Prospero figure only confuses matters further.
The couples for whom true love never did run smooth give disappointingly uneven performances. Demetrius and Lysander are men behaving badly -Matthew Macfadyen and John Lloyd-Fillingham, respectively doing their limited best to give animation to the likely lads. Rebecca Egan, by contrast, provides an intelligent portrayal of Helena while Katy Brittain exaggerates Hermia into a howling hysteric who not only delivers her lines like Eartha Kitt but seems to find it necessary to transmit semaphore at the same time.
To the extent that the mechanicals scenes are foolproof comedy, they are here also a success. Christopher Benjamin is nicely lugubrious as Bottom. Eccentric in motorcycle helmet and white scarf he offers a passing salute to Ralph Richardson, an actor who, in his day, exasperated more than a few Peter Quinces. Bernard Lloyd is fresh and lively as Quince, Sean McKenzie extemporizes as the Lion, Steven O’Neill camps Thisby to death and Mike Burnside manages some good wall gags in the doorway.
But it is the point at which Bottom intersects the faery world, a changeling moment full of savage comedy and sexual ribaldry, that the production’s evasions and limitations are most evident. Titania appears in her umbrella bower, Betty Boop surrounded by the United Fairies of Benetton. Oberon’s saturnine fantasies and Bottom’s innocent donkey business are obscured by fluttery set pieces in primary colours and fright wigs. For a moment, in the final scene at midnight, I thought we might get a solo from Mr Mistoffelees or some other Rum Tum Tugger.
Like it or not, Shakespearean productions create successions, and make breakthroughs which become established orthodoxies. The Brook Dream was one such moment and a number of intelligent productions explored the newly opened terrain. Adrian Noble’s version basks lazily in the achievement preceding it and runs the risk of losing insights hard won from the sentimental fustiness of the Edwardians. This production is a middlebrow sweetmeat, a prozac reverie, part cartoon and part Dad’s army. It is a pretty sight, with moments of charming comedy, but it is not such stuff as the Dream is made on.
The Adelaide Review, April, 1997.
Coming Up in April
until 6 April. Take Over program continues.
8-26 April. Private Lives by Noel Coward. MTC production. Featuring Phillip Holder, Nicki Wendt. Director Roger Hodgman, designer Shaun Gurton. The Playhouse.
17 -26 April. Company B Belvoir’s The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. Neil Armfield directs, featuring Gillian Jones, Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh and Noah Taylor. The Space.
24 April. The Phantom of the Opera. Festival Theatre.
29 April – 10 May. Gershwin Brothers’ Porgy and Bess. New York production. Her Majesty’s Theatre.
Further on. Guinness Celebration of Irish Music returns in May. Donal Lunny, Eimear Quinn, Tamalin and more.