A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

combination of ordinary mortals and supernatural elements. The mortals are two pairs of lovers on the brink of marriage. The supernatural element features a temple with a priest and priestess. Benjamin Britten’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1960) evokes the wood, where his opera starts with discordant glissandos on the cello and a chorus of boys as fairies. Specific instruments are imagined for different groups of characters throughout, in a witty musical way. Fairies are strings,wind section, and percussion, especially the xylophone for Robin. The mechanicals are characterized by the brass section, the trombone for Bottom and, not surprisingly, the flute for Flute. The most striking characterization is the countertenor part for Oberon, which creates an eerie otherworldly effect. Titania sings a beautiful, lyrical aria to Bottom as an ass, and the encounter of Pyramus and Thisbe is written as a subtle parody of Puccini.
    The combination of Shakespeare’s play and Mendelssohn’s music has proved inspirational to choreographers from Petipa (1877) to George Balanchine (1962) and Frederick Ashton (1964). Balanchine created
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
for the New York City Ballet. He was inspired principally by Mendelssohn’s music and, in order to produce his first full-length ballet in America, added extra music from other works of Mendelssohn’s. Ashton’s
The Dream
is also set in the wood and focuses on the fairies and the lovers. Of the mechanicals only Bottom features as a rustic transformed by Robin who wakes Titania. Lindsay Kemp, who plays Robin in a 1994
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
directed by Celestino Coronado, effectively turned the play into “Puck’s Dream,” in which the action opens and closes with him asleep wrapped in a cobweb. The production is clearly related to Reinhardt’s influential 1935 film, on the one hand, and Peter Brook’s staging, influenced by the Polish critic Jan Kott (see below), on the other.
    The play’s mix of comedy, romance, and magic has proved irresistible to filmmakers, starting with a twelve-minute American silent version in 1909 directed by J. Stuart Blackton and Charles Kent for the Vitagraph Company of America. This was a radically simplified version of the story, shot outdoors on a windy day. There is an obvious attempt at authentic Athenian costume and presumably equally authentic fairy costume. Fairies seem to be female. Robin is a little girl and there are two other little girl fairies. Oberon has turned inexplicably into Penelope.
    Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film won well-deserved Oscars for Ralph Dawson, Best Film Editing, and Hal Mohr, Best Cinematography. Mohr was never nominated but was the one and only person to win due to a popular write-in campaign. The following year the Academy changed the rules so that it couldn’t happen again. The scenes in thewood with a chorus of fairies and an orchestra of elves and gnomes are brilliantly shot and directed to Mendelssohn’s music, arranged by Erich Korngold. The overall effect is exhilarating and the casting full of surprises, including a very young Mickey Rooney as Robin and James Cagney as Bottom.
    Peter Hall’s 1968 film, a version of his RSC stage production, shot at Compton Verney (less than ten miles from Stratford), betrays its age in the women’s costumes—Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena are wearing 1960s miniskirts with long boots. The fairies are flower children and Judi Dench wears nothing except a body stocking and some strategically placed flowers. The 1992
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, abridged by Leon Garfield, is one of the most successful of this Russian/British collaboration in which a dozen of the most popular plays were reworked for children. Drawing and animation are excellent—incorporating expressive touches such as Titania’s lips turning from green to red when she’s “enamoured of