A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2014: Dominic Dromgoole

I have generally enjoyed the Globe Theatre versions of the Shakespeare plays. This one just doesn’t really do it for me. While A Midsummer Night’s Dream has abundant silliness, some of which is very broad slapstick, I think there is a case to be made that that’s not the only thing to the play. Here (as with some other productions also directed by Dominic Dromgoole), everything is converted to farce; a play with some nuance — or at least variation in tone and delivery — is flattened to a homogeneous and eventually tedious cascade of sight gags, running gags, prat falls, and repetitive, overworked, bawdy implication. It strives to be naughty, ironic, and arch, and it succeeds. The mark of that success is that it has drained most of what is worthwhile from a play that actually has much more to offer.

The staging is exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and every opportunity for silliness is drawn out with an abundance of stage business that doesn’t really harmonize even with itself by the time it’s done. The lovers (probably the best performances in the play) are suitably silly. So are the rude mechanicals putting on the play (Bottom, Quince, Snug, etc.). But then again, Theseus and Hippolyta are silly, too; so are Oberon and Titania (played by the same actors). All that’s left is silliness. The actors do a great deal of physical humor — backflips, swinging on ropes, doing push-ups, and generally mugging, but little of it really adds to the play. To my point of view, though, that’s not the worst of it. They also supply (not from the script) a barrage of ironic twenty-first-century metatextual asides that accumulate to form a relentless assault on the play itself — to the point that one wonders why they’re even bothering to do it. They seem to be wanting to hold it up not as a piece of entertainment, but as itself the object of ridicule. Shakespeare affords us an opportunity to snicker at ridiculous drama right here in the play of Pyramus and Thisbe; I don't think he meant for the whole of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be the object of mockery and nothing else, however.

In particular I find the performances of Oberon and Titania depressing and repellent. As often, the same pair of actors play them as play Theseus and Hippolyta. That’s fine — it’s a dramaturgical decision that can bring out some of the parallels between the two couples. The problem here is that virtually all their interaction is conducted in in an unrelieved fortissimo: they seem perpetually to be instantiations of Punch and Judy, their range varying from bellowing to yelling to howling and back again, but with not much else, at least until the end of the play. In the process they have destroyed virtually all the music of Shakespeare’s language. Oberon and Titania need to be strong characters, not necessarily loud ones. These are not strong: they are merely belligerent, ignorant, and rude. There’s a difference.

Having seen this dramaturgical pattern in several of the Globe series, I’ve come to the conclusion that this may be less the fault of the actors than of Dromgoole’s direction; similar damage has happened in other plays that he’s directed as well. I am particularly minded of the volatile and blustery Duke in his Measure for Measure, who vacillates from reasonableness to explosive outbursts with virtually no provocation or reason. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has less serious content to lose than Measure for Measure, of course; its remarkable feature is its repository of lyrically beautiful language. Almost all of it gets ground under the jack-boot of a tyrannical irony. Titania barks out her lines at Oberon like a Marine drill sergeant. Passages like this from Act II, scene 1 don’t tolerate that well:

His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking the embarked traders on the flood,
When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following — her womb then rich with my young squire —
Would imitate, and sail upon the land,
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.

Titania is just vastly more interesting if her only emotion is not petulant anger. Here she’s being reflective, and affording at least the audience a view of her own vulnerability. Her reasons for denying Oberon are deep and emotional with her, and she handles them gently. Helen Mirren’s rendition of the same lines in the BBC version (1981) is instructive.

Oberon’s responses are about at the same level; his best lines, in fact, are those directed to Puck. But even Puck is over the top. Everything becomes a gag line. The audience laughs almost constantly. I guess they’re having a good time. But they’re basically attending a circus. One wonders whether they’d like the Shakespeare play.

Pearce Quigley’s performance of Bottom (surely a plum part for any actor) is singled out by some reviewers as being especially brilliant. In a way it is. It’s nuanced and entertaining — but like so much else here, it seems to be directed chiefly at the knowing nudge-wink between the performers and the audience — and that’s inevitably at the expense of the play as a whole. It draws one away from the genuine pleasures of the play into a kind of conspiratorial “well, we know better, don’t we?” attitude. He reinforces it with one or another gesture, including an allusion to Austen Powers, which is, I guess, the kind of thing critics consider brilliant these days. I’d rather not approach every work with the attitude of supercilious condescension it tends to breed.

The roles I personally found most engaging were the two female lovers. Sarah MacRae’s Helena is given a little room to expand on her sense of outrage and injury at the wrong that has been done her. She manages to convey her bewilderment and pain with enough finesse that we can be drawn into her character, as we really cannot into anyone else’s.

As an auditory experience, the play is also something of an assault. The noisier and more unpleasant the sound a character is making, the more likely it is to be repeated again and again and again. The music is a melange of Renaissance music and jazz trombone — again, the musical equivalent of mugging for the camera, but contrived to break the dramatic illusion.

I wanted to like this performance. The setting of the Globe is engaging and, when used properly, it’s an enlivening element in bringing the Shakespearean experience to audiences. I realize that popularizing these plays is one of the missions of the Globe Theatre. Yet it’s also possible to sacrifice what you’re popularizing to the lowest common denominator — killing it in an act of unwise promotion. I realize, too, that much of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was set up to appeal to the so-called “groundlings”. Shakespeare is not above getting off a pot-shot at someone prominent, or making a ribald pun. But if that’s all that’s left of this play, a good deal too much has been lost.

Buy A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Amazon.