A Midsummer Night’s Dream

"I wasn’t even aware of the fact that the others were all tragedies. I just chose the ones I liked best. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play of intoxicating beauty and magic, and it’s a play which I loved as a child. It’s a play which takes you into this world of woodland madness. The word ‘wood’ in English means both a forest and madness. I have a childhood memory of seeing the 1935 Max Reinhardt film—with music by Mendelssohn—of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and it never gets out of your system. I know there are dark interpretations of the play—dangerous ones—and of course the young women who are so vocal and so funny in the woodland don’t say anything at the end of the play, they are silent. That’s presumably a patriarchal template being re-imposed on the play at the end, but in the meantime we have been through this magical, topsy-turvy, poetically incredibly beautiful world. I love it. Oh, I think very seriously. After all, the play starts with Athens: a world of reason, of rational philosophy, of the subjugation of women—Theseus and Hippolyta and all that—and we are told that the law of Athens cannot be subverted. Then what happens? The lovers elope into the forest, into the wood, and everything is turned inside out. They are bewitched and it is always pointed out, quite rightly, that the love juice is not taken off the eye of Demetrius at the end, so he goes back into the real world literally transformed, not unbound from the magic. I think Shakespeare is clearly on the side of this kind of carnivalesque magic, this world where everything goes. It is also, I have to say, an extremely funny, brilliant play. I think Shakespeare is extremely self-conscious about the theatre. He was a man of the theatre: lives the theatre, breathes the theatre, writes for specific people in the company on more than one occasion, so I think of course the mechanicals are hilariously funny. “It’s as if Shakespeare is saying: it is a play after all. It’s only a play” If people interpret A Midsummer Night’s Dream as if it were some Websterian tragedy that seems to me to go against the grain of the work. It is a brilliantly funny, in many ways innocent work. It recognises that we are creatures of the body, of our sexualities, as much as we are creatures of spirit and mind and decency, and it is sometimes a wonderful active release. The play within the play is the quintessence of theatre. Pyramus and Thisbe are in a way of course Romeo and Juliet by another name, but they are also a reflection on what has been going on inside the main play. Perhaps it’s showing us that it could be tragic, it could be comic, but we don’t have to be too serious about it. It’s as if Shakespeare is saying: it is a play after all. It’s only a play."

"A Midsummer Night’s Dream has always been a great favourite of mine, ever since my school days. I was introduced to it at school when I was about 11 or 12. I’ve seen many productions of it. It’s the first play I edited, for the New Penguin Shakespeare, in 1967. I very much enjoyed writing about it then. It’s a play about imagination, about Shakespeare’s own heart, in many ways. The Mechanicals’ scenes, as they’re called, in which Shakespeare portrays amateur actors putting on the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, actually tell us an awful lot about Shakespeare’s attitude towards the theatre and the acting profession. They’re also wonderfully playable. It’s a play that appeals very much to young people. I’m speaking now from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-Upon-Avon and we have what’s called ‘Shakespeare Week,’ when we engage with over 10,000 primary schools. The Royal Shakespeare Company put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which uses amateur actors, including schoolchildren. It’s also a play about Shakespeare’s own art. He is writing about the art of theatre and, more generally, about the imagination. He has a wonderful speech in the play about poets. It’s a very funny play, it’s a very beautiful play, it’s got some lovely verse and some very fine prose. It’s, again, a very actable play. I’ve seen lovely productions of this over the years since 1962, when Peter Hall directed it with a lovely cast including Ian Richardson as Oberon and Judi Dench as Titania. Judi Dench went on to play the role again when she was seventy-five years old, a few years ago, in Richmond, and very successfully because it’s an ageless sort of part. It’s a part that gives amazing opportunity for beautiful verse-speaking because of the way in which the fairy world speaks. It’s an all-encompassing play. It’s delicate, it’s charming, but also a deeply serious play because Shakespeare is concerned as much with the art of theatre, as with the work of the imaginative artist: whether the artist is a writer or an actor."