[In the following review, Jackson comments on Michael Boyd's 1999-2000 stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Boyd discusses the production's emphasis on the sexuality of the forest and its inhabitants and its use of dance and movement as unifying elements within the play.]

In my previous report on Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon I wondered more in sorrow than in anger what kind of artistic policy the RSC might lay claim to.¹ Whether or not in the course of the “Summer Festival Season” the company found a policy, they certainly acquired a stage, which may amount to the same thing. The 1500-seat proscenium-arch main house, with whose architecture directors and designers have struggled since it opened in 1932, was remodeled under the direction of the company's resident designer, Anthony Rowe. For the summer season the company installed a deep, elliptical platform stage, on which the principal action of each play was performed. The space upstage of the proscenium arch was relegated to providing background images or (for long stretches of some of the season's plays) simply closed off from view. In order to make the actors visible to spectators at the back of the topmost level, the new platform was higher than in previous attempts to bring the stage forward (such as that of the 1976 season). Consequently, the front two rows of stalls on either side of it became “restricted-view” seats, and the performers' horizontal sight line was slightly above the heads of the audience in the middle and rear stall seats.

But two other elements of the past twelve months' work in Stratford were definitely signs of policy: an increased attention to clarity of speech (reinforced by company voice classes) and the designation of the main season, from March to September, as a “summer festival.” The voice work—together with the remodeled stage—addressed directly some criticisms made in recent years by giving speech and action priority over scenic display. The renaming amounted to a repackaging of the company's scheduling so that it at least seemed coherent, even as it revived a concept that the RSC left behind some two decades or more ago. Four Shakespeare plays over four months, all given in the largest of the Stratford spaces, were well attended. By the end of the period tickets for most performances (particularly Timon of Athens) were hard to come by, but this was still a considerable retrenchment on previous scheduling in terms of the number of productions and performances. The choice of Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and Timon of Athens) was complemented by at least three later plays with a bearing on the dramatist's work: Schiller's Don Carlos in the Other Place and Eliot's The Family Reunion and a dramatized selection of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid in the Swan. Schiller's play includes variations on Hamlet—a gloomy prince, the expectancy and rose of a not-very-fair state, is kept back from university in an oppressive court and has major problems with parents and paramour. There are also occasional smacks in it of The Winter's Tale, Othello, and King Lear, echoes of the last allowing John Woodvine as King Philip, both fearsome and pitiable, to suggest what he might do with a Shakespearean role that has yet to come his way. Tales from Ovid, adapted by Simon Reade and the director Tim Supple, was an eloquently spoken and choreographed ensemble piece, full of striking and simple story-telling devices for its tales of the gods' interference with humans and the sometimes terrifying consequences. It also included some larky male nudity (Pan and his newly acquired disciple Midas) and powerful erotic images (in the Semele episode, for example). In addition to these productions, the season included a powerful new adaptation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and a new work, Warwickshire Testimony, by April di Angelis at The Other Place. Greg Doran directed a stylish, dark Volpone at the Swan, with Malcolm Storry as Volpone and Guy Henry as Mosca.

In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Michael Boyd with designs by Tom Piper, Athens was distinctly chilly. The courtiers, in heavy overcoats and fur hats, stood stiffly at attention in front of the curving wall of plain white that bounded the back of the forestage. Snow fell from the dark sky visible above the wall. The bursts of applause with which the courtiers reacted to Theseus's and Hippolyta's speeches were prompted by a bowler-hatted, white-gloved master of ceremonies. This looked like Moscow, circa 1956, in a court where the stern Athenian law would be enforced with a kind of frigid absolutism. Hippolyta (Josette Simon) did not appear to be unduly displeased with her lot as the intended bride of Theseus (Nicholas Jones), but the harsh treatment of Egeus's daughter clearly disturbed her. She moved to Hermia's side during Theseus's harangue (he seemed embarrassed to have to deliver it), and as she left the stage, she lingered to look at the prospective victim.

With the move to the forest the curved wall of doorways at the back remained in place, but flowers suddenly sprang up through holes in the stage. One of the Athenian court ladies, wearing an all-enveloping overcoat, fur hat, and gloves, came on and began to pick them. The master of ceremonies, still in bowler hat and coat, accosted her—and they began to tear off each other's outer garments until she was revealed (once her spectacles were removed) as a very flirtatious and décolleté First Fairy and he as the barechested Puck. Only the impending arrival of Oberon and Titania (doubled with Theseus and Hippolyta) prevented them from having sex there and then. It was probably this moment of passion suddenly unbridled that provoked a teacher with a party of schoolchildren to make a protest—subsequently nurtured into a flurry of press interest—about the wholesale lubricity of the production. In fact, the director hardly went any further than other recent interpreters of the play, and there was a clear distinction between mortal passions before and after fairy influence. Hermia's insistence that Lysander “lie further off” and his clumsy attempts to lie closer when they decide to go to sleep were not played leeringly, and although Helena went into the woods wearing a short red dress and high heels—perhaps hoping this would get her man for her—it was the wood and its inhabitants that held the key to sexuality. In order to administer the juice of the vision-altering flower, Puck arrived onstage dressed as a gardener, with a wheelbarrow, a watering can, and a substantial plant, its roots clogged with soil. He pulled Lysander's coat up over his face, heaped some dirt on top of his head, “planted” the flower, and watered it in like a good gardener. The mayhem of the long lovers' scene (3.2) was appropriately acrobatic (Hermia being pitched head over heels offstage at one point) but scarcely erotic. However, goings-on elsewhere in the wood seemed to have some effect on these lovers. When Puck rearranged the recumbent and disheveled mortals after their night of confusion, he entwined them suggestively, having planted the antidote to the magic flower firmly over Lysander's groin. After all, these are the “lovebirds” that, as Theseus observes when he finds them, have begun “to couple now.”

Titania's seduction of Bottom (David Ryan) was as physically direct as has become customary, and her bower was a solid and commodious bed that descended from the flies: as the first part of the performance ended, she and Bottom were clearly already getting on well. When the bed was lowered again in 4.1, Titania's arms were hanging over the side as she sprawled in an attitude of satisfied exhaustion. Bottom appeared in a dressing-gown and smoking a postcoital cheroot, with the smug air of one relaxing after a job well done. It was clear that some of the fairy attendants fancied similar treatment from him and had to be kept in check.

The woodland selves of all the Athenians seemed transformed and enhanced by the production's doubling. This was simply effected by change of costume (Oberon had long tails to his coat and a tattoo-like mark on his bald head), a pattern of stylized movement using the whole stage, and the equipping of each fairy with a repeated gesture, half nervous tic, or half “magic” pass of the hands. The “fairy” who had been Egeus, for example, held his right hand in the air above his head and shook it as though inducing some kind of hypnotic trance: touchingly, he seemed to echo (and counterpose) his mortal self by holding this hand in benediction over Hermia. Oberon was as smoothly spoken and assured as Theseus had been, with the added abilities to be invisible, to fly (courtesy of a chair lowered from the flies), and to move through the earth (on a ladder that rose through a trap for him to ascend Titania's bower). Titania was only slightly less inhibited in demeanor than Hippolyta: Josette Simon took the stage in the first scene with an assurance befitting an Amazonian queen, captured or otherwise, while Theseus seemed a little nervous and hesitant once Egeus's demand for judgment against Hermia had placed him on the spot. Puck found aerial travel rather more troublesome: after collecting the magic flower, he arrived bedraggled and still sweating. Bottom, with asinine teeth, luxuriant facial hair, and eminently strokable ears, was an amiable monster for Titania to love. There were moments of darkness in the production (notably when Demetrius threatened Hermia with a knife), and the lovers' dismay and physical distress were not merely a matter of torn clothes and besmirched faces. On balance, though, this was no nightmare.

Dance and movement were a well-conceived unifying element. In their first scene the “hard-handed men of Athens” entered in a line, solemn and sober-suited, then turned to face the audience and performed a stamping line-dance reminiscent of The Full Monty. Later, disconsolate at the absence of Bottom, their chief actor, they made a half-hearted attempt at the same routine. In a pleasing coup, “Pyramus and Thisbe” was performed in Elizabethan dress, with Peter Quince looking somewhat like Shakespeare. After an appropriately hilarious rendition of the tragedy (Bottom lost his sword blade, Thisbe had to make do with the hilt), the bergamask consisted of a version of the men's steps seen in 1.2, which then became a solemn fandango-like number as Bottom—with some temerity—held out his hand to Hippolyta. When she took it and joined in, the dance turned into the more “primitive” stamping, hip-gyrating dance with which Oberon and Titania had rocked the ground in 4.1: the woodland had invaded the palace. At the end of the play, when the fairy king and queen returned, dance was varied into another ritualistic mode, again evoking fertility rites, as with sweeping gestures they waved fronds of greenery over their heads to scatter “field-dew” across the stage.

Notes

1. See my “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1996-98: or the Search for a Policy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 185-205.