A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare Page B

May Day festival became key to most post-1960 productions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. The exploration of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, of the real world and the fairy world, turned the court of Theseus into the embodiment of society’s repression and the forest of Athens into a therapeutic playground for an exploration of the self. After Jan Kott’s essay “Titania and the Ass’s Head” (in his
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
, published in English translation in 1964), productions of the
Dream
picked up on the strand of dark sexualityevident in the text. Peter Brook, whose landmark production of 1970 marked a shifting point in how directors thought about the play, pointed out that “The
Dream
is not a piece for the kids—it’s a very powerful sexual play.” 12 He also commented:
    The
Dream
is a play about magic, spirits, fairies. Today we don’t believe in any one of those things and yet, perhaps, we do. The fairy imagery which the Victorian and even post-Victorian tradition has given us in relation to the
Dream
has to be rejected—it has died on us. But one can’t take an anti-magical, and down-to-earth view of the
Dream …
the interest in working on the
Dream
is to take a play which is apparently composed of very artificial, unreal elements and to discover that it is a true, a real play. 13
    Rejecting the “cute, gauzy, bewinged creatures” 14 of the Victorian era, modern productions reinterpreted how magic was represented in the play with a variety of tricks used by weird and wonderful fairies. Attention to the whole art of theatrical illusion, in the staging, and in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, also emphasized the metatheatrical nature of the play, to a degree that had only been glanced at by productions of the early twentieth century.
    Peter Brook’s 1970 production was almost without question the most influential single production of any Shakespeare play in the second half of the twentieth century. In the words of the critic Trevor R. Griffiths,
    Other directors of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
had already seen the need to remove various sentimental accretions, others had made the fairies a strong physical presence in the lovers’ quarrels, others had seen possibilities in doubling the mortal and fairy rulers or stressing the therapeutic value of the events in the wood … but [Brook’s] triumph lay in creating a powerful crystallisation of these various elements into a unified and cohesive whole. 15
    No director could avoid the influence of this staging of the
Dream:
“If they did not turn their backs on Brook’s achievement, [they] tried somehow to get around it or to find other ways of presenting the play without going to such extremes as Brook felt compelled to do. Or they reverted to something closer to traditional ‘picture-book’ versions of the play.” 16

    3. Peter Brook’s 1970 production, with white box and trapeze.
    Exploring Brook’s production and those that followed, this section will examine how the treatment of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
reflects a change in critical thinking about the play. Looking at abstract stagings, nightmarish dreams, and the more overtly sexual take on the scenes in the forest, we will see how the play has come into its own in the latter part of the twentieth century, exploring issues which previous stagings of Shakespeare’s magical play had neglected.
“All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” 17
    In 1970, the theater critic J. C. Trewin remarked that “We have met the fantasy in so many forms; over-decorated and under-decorated, as a swooningly Victorian album or as a Jacobean masque. The Wood has been a complicated forest and austere, moon-silvered thicket, or a garden in Regent’s Park.” 18 With productions of the
Dream
occurring every three or four years in the RSC’s