Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Titania awakes but Bottom "waketh not".

An interesting take on MSND

Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream 

By CLIVE BARNES

Published: January 21, 1971 

Many people have seen magic in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the magic of moonshine and fairyland, and-since no Shakespearean play has been so foully encrusted over with nineteenth-century romanticism-the magic of Mendelssohn and bosky scenery looking good enough to eat. Peter Brook has also seen magic in the Dream, but it is the magic of man. His production of the play, first seen last summer at Stratford-on-Avon and now gloriously come to the Billy Rose Theater, is also full of the magic of the theater.

It is a celebration of life and fancy, of man and his imagination, his fate, and the brevity of his brief candle in the light of the world. Shakespeare gave us "the lunatic, the lover and the poet," and Brook smilingly added the acrobat.

This is without any equivocation whatsoever the greatest production of Shakespeare I have ever seen in my life-and for my joys and my sins I have seen literally hundreds. Its greatness lies partly in its insight into man, and best of all its remarkable insight into Shakespeare. But it also lies in its originality. It is the most genuinely and deeply original production of Shakespeare in decades.
So-called original Shakespeare often is enough to make sensitive and sensible men squirm. It usually means strange texts, outlandish readings, battered phrases, rude glosses and impertinent additions. Here it means no such thing. Here it means merely that Brook has forgotten-not really forgotten, for on occasion he jokes about it-or at least ignored, that scaly accretion of time called a classic's performing tradition. Brook has behaved as if A Midsummer Night's Dream had been written just last midsummer by a young man with an archaic turn of phrase, an immortal gift for poetry, and no ability whatsoever to write stage directions.

He has taken this script and staged it with regard for nothing but its sense and meaning. He has collaborated with Shakespeare, not twisted his arm or blinded his senses, not tried to be superior, but just helped him out to get this strange play on stage.

Titania's bower and her people.

Helped by the designer Sally Jacobs, Brook has placed the play within three white and gleaming walls. Across the back are two white doors, and on top of the walls are battlements where musicians can play, actors run or wait, or even on occasion dangle scenery into the playing cockpit below. Its purpose? And for that matter, the purpose of an Oberon on a trapeze, a Puck who juggles with plates or dashes across the scene on Tarzan rope or runs on stilts? Why all this? Are they merely the tricks of Brook's fertile imagination; conjurations to while the time, and limn out a little talent? Emphatically no.
Brook has taken this play as pristine new and samite white. But he also knows that we take to the play our expectations taken from schoolhouse and playhouse. He wants, I think, to surprise us into listening to these lute-songs of the spirit with new ears and unencumbered intelligences.
His one liberty-and this has been taken in some circles as a mere literary conceit-has been to combine the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta with those of Oberon and Titania, that of Philostrate with Puck and that of Egeus with Quince. What sounds perverse in theory, in practice serves to emphasize the playwright's purpose. Shakespeare should have done such a combination himself. For a rare once, the director knows best.

For now the play takes on the shape of an allegory of love, with the actors, and their plays within plays, whether they be mechanicals or poets, all pointed toward some explanation of sudden love and eventual mortality. "What fools these mortals be," muses Puck. But here Puck too is mortal, and fairyland is only a dimension of love, for Theseus, Oberon and, yes, even, the comically tragic Pyramus, all are lovers.
Brook takes the elements of the theater and mixes them as if he were a chef trying out a recipe. Circus tricks, Indian chants, flamenco guitar, children's streamers, paper plates, mock and mocked Mendelssohn, all are thrown into some eclectic broth. Only the text is sacred, to be illuminated, or like some holy child, cosseted, and once in a while cuffed behind the ear, to show a proper religious irreverence.

This year our cast is very young and mostly girls...

The superb actors seem as dedicated to Brook as Brook is to Shakespeare. Alan Howard, humorous and compassionate as the Theseus/Oberon, Sara Kestelman, sensual and womanly as the Hippolyta/Titania, John Kane's supremely amused Puck, David Waller's humanistic and appealing Bottom, the Quince of Philip Locke, the lovers of Mary Rutherford, Frances de la Tour, Terence Taplin and Ben Kingsley are all masterly in the natural way of men and women surprised in life rather than actors caught acting.
If you have any interest in the theater, in life or in your fellow men, I think you will be transfixed by this Dream. And, if you haven't, well, even so, you might appreciate still the fun and the juggling. As Shakespeare would surely be the first to admit, jugglers have their place.