A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare Page A

an ass.”
    Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film is a lush romantic version in which the emphasis is on love and sex. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, the opening titles announce that “necklines were high and parents were rigid,” “bustles were in decline,” and that “newfangled invention, the bicycle” was on the rise. The central performance is Kevin Kline’s romantic Bottom.
    The RSC, in conjunction with Film4, produced a screen version (1996) based on Adrian Noble’s 1994 stage production. It reveals its debt to Peter Brook in the modernist set and bright, modern clothes. The story is mediated through the experience of a little boy. The opening shot pans around the child’s bedroom and finally focuses on him asleep. In answer to the question “Whose dream is it?,” the answer becomes “a child’s”—a problematic device in many respects.
    Modern critical and theatrical practice responds to the play’s metatheatricality, to its knowing self-awareness of life as inherently performative in a way that speaks to postmodern theories relating to the loss of the real and the superabundance of simulacra. Performance styles have moved away from representations of pictorial realism to engage the audience directly. Noble’s and ElijahMoshinsky’s 1981 BBC television production both have Robin employ the “forbidden look”: a stare straight to camera, analogous to the actor’s direct address to the audience in Shakespeare’s own theater. Contemporary theater has knocked down the fourth wall and is concerned to play with knowing irony on the relationship between actor, role, and audience.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
resonates with our cultural self-reflexivity: modernity, or rather post-modernity, responds to the play’s ironic confusion of planes of reality and blurring of boundaries between the political, emotional, psychological, sexual, and spiritual. At one level the play suggests that life is complex and problematic, but things will work out. But at the margins, contained within the play’s various fictions, it recognizes only too clearly that they may not.
AT THE RSC
The Shifting Point
    In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
the war amongst the fairies has resulted not only in a loss of control of elements and seasons: human beings also have become at odds with each other. It is a kind of cold war and all life as well as all nature has been set a-jangling. It seems that the mortals can find peace only when Oberon and Titania have found it. And more than this—they can find it only after being drawn into the world of Dreams back to the roots of mythology and folklore and into Oberon’s domain of half-light—more revealing by far in its fantasies than the world of Reality.
    (Program note from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, 1960, Old Vic, directed by Michael Langham)
    To the Elizabethans, seasonal festivals and significant calendar events like May Day, Midsummer, and Twelfth Night were not just important landmarks framing the cycle of the year, but in their celebration acted as a release valve for human behavior. The energy normally occupied in maintaining inhibition was freed for celebration. These times of misrule when social norms were turned on their head had a cathartic power, and for the young they often involved “a right of passage between generations, a means of making the transition from the old world to the new.” 11 The sanctioned freeing from society’s usual constraints was seen as a release, but also, by contrast, as an affirmation of the rules and morals that normally guided people’s lives.

    2. Production of 1959, with a suggestion of Queen Elizabeth. The kind of gentle, picturesque
Dream
that was reacted against in an influential essay by the Polish critic Jan Kott, which proposed a darker and far more sexually charged, even brutal, reading of the play.
    The psychological benefits of the