by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode of Shakespeare
Uncovered, a quite interesting
British TV series for which so far imdb.com lists only one season (and the PBS
Web site is even less helpful; instead of offering printed transcripts, cast
and crew lists, all they
seem to have for their shows these days is video links so you can stream the
program itself — hey, guys, I’ve already seen it; now, how about some of the
honest-to-goodness information your site used to provide in the days before social media?) but there
is a second one, and this episode featured British actor Hugh Bonneville (who,
blessedly, pronounced the “t” in “often”!) expounding on A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and talking about three
recent productions of it as well as reminiscing about his professional acting
debut in a 1968 production at an open-air theatre in London (called, simply and
directly, “Open-Air Theatre”) understudying the role of Lysander, the principal
romantic lead, for another actor who went on to an even more illustrious career
than his: Ralph Fiennes. There were brief clips from the first film ever made
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a one-reel American silent from 1909 — as well as the first talking
version, produced by Warner Bros. in 1935 and directed by Max Reinhardt (based
on his famous stage production of the play) with the incidental music composed
by Felix Mendelssohn in the 19th century and adapted here by Erich
Wolfgang Korngold for his first job in films. Ironically, Bonneville’s
narration argued that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s best-constructed plays
while I, in my blog post on the Reinhardt film, felt the other way about it: “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is one
of Shakespeare’s most charming plays but also one of his least well structured;
the three interlocking plots — the battle of Athenian prince Theseus (Ian
Hunter, a British actor who delivers the Shakespearean dialogue idiomatically
enough but seems so hammy he practically glues himself to the lens) to get the
bride he’s forced to marry him, Amazonian queen Hippolyta (the Athenians have
just defeated the Amazons in battle and she’s his prize for the victory), to
love him; the interlocking romantic intrigues of Lysander (Dick Powell, pushing
his naturally high voice even higher than usual and responding to the challenge
of acting Shakespeare by speaking as if he sucked on helium before each take),
Hermia (Olivia de Havilland), Demetrius (real-life Bisexual Ross Alexander, who
looks so queeny in this one you wonder why he and Powell don’t pair up and
leave the women alone) and Helena (Jean Muir); and the intrigue among the
fairies and also the proletarian players who are anxious to win the lifetime
pension offered to anyone who performs a show at Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s
wedding — don’t really reflect each other that well and often get in each
other’s way.”
Where the show was strongest was in exploring the performance
tradition of the play, including its virtual disappearance from the British
stage for 200 years (all theatre
was banned in Britain under the Taliban-like rule of “Lord Protector” Oliver
Cromwell in the 1650’s but most of Shakespeare’s plays returned to British
stages after the Restoration), explained mainly due to producers’ and
audiences’ discomfort about the supernatural elements: fairies, love potions, a
human turned into a donkey, and the like. Even when it was performed it was frequently done in mutilated
versions in which at least one of the three separate levels of characters — the
ordinary people in and around the Athenian court, the fairies and the so-called
“Mechanicals,” the proletarians putting on a play about star-crossed lovers
Pyramus and Thisbe (quite obviously a Shakespearean self-parody of Romeo and
Juliet!) — were removed. I
remembered the Reinhardt film as sometimes magnificent and sometimes maddening,
but the clips from it shown in the Shakespeare Uncovered episode — particularly of James Cagney’s great
performance as Bottom (his edgy combination of masculine toughness and quirky
vulnerability absolutely blew away all the prissily “correct” British actors we
saw clips of from later productions!) — were welcome. A Midsummer Night’s
Dream might be considered the
first (or one of the first; Christopher Marlowe’s and Samuel Rowley’s Doctor
Faustus also might be counted if
it weren’t so obviously the work of two separate people, with Marlowe’s
magisterial language in the first and last acts and mostly Rowley’s
comic-relief prose in between) examples of a post-modern play (well,
Shakespeare invented so many of the conventions of the modern theatre, why
shouldn’t he be credited with inventing post-modernism as well?), with its
wrenching gear shifts in tone and genre and its overall impression of a work almost terminally at war with
itself. Shakespeare is believed to have written it not for a production at the Globe Theatre, his usual
stamping ground, but for a private performance at the second wedding of the
Earl of Oxford’s mother (you know, Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, who some
contentious goons regard as the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays with the
Man from Stratford serving merely as “front” — as opposed to the people who
think Christopher Marlowe was the “real” Shakespeare, both theories that have a
lot of ’splainin’ to do about how new Shakespeare plays continued to appear
after both DeVere and Marlowe were dead), which makes it odd that he should
have written a script that was so cynical about love (it’s the source of the
famous cliché about how “the course of true love never did run smooth”) and in
which the long-term married couple, fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, are
the biggest butts of the jokes.
Like most of Shakespeare’s plays, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is
greater than any one production of it — it’s been chopped, channeled and run
through the modern meatgrinder of Regietheater, including one abominable-looking production we
get clips of by Peter Brook in 1970 which dispensed with real forests (or the
usual stage simulacra thereof) and had the action staged in front of a backdrop
of geometric lines with the actors suspended above the stage like performers in
Cirque du Soleil (which, to Brook’s credit, didn’t yet exist when he did this
production). What comes through most from this show is how sophisticated a
writer Shakespeare really was — when the four fairy-crossed lovers meet in the
woods after the love potion has scrambled their affections, Shakespeare writes
first in rhyming couplets and then switches to blank verse as the emotional
mood grows darker and more “serious” — and this play just adds to the
Shakespeare enigma, that an author from a relatively humble background who may
not even have been able to read or write (I’ve long suspected that one reason
we have no original manuscript pages from Shakespeare’s plays and few documents
bearing his signature is he may never have learned to read or write and may
have written the plays by dictation) could create such works not only of
everlasting linguistic beauty but structural literary complexity as well. What,
one wonders, did the groundlings at the Globe make of these plays when they
were new? Did they realize they were watching something special, or did they
just sit through them the way modern moviegoers sit through an action film,
waiting through the exposition for the big effects scenes to happen?
