Shakespeare Plays Available in Video Format
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All’s Well That Ends Well
Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Hamlet
Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Henry VIII
Julius Caesar
King John
King Lear
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Macbeth
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
Pericles
Richard II
Richard III
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Twelfth Night
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeareana

Available versions

1909: Charles Kent, J. Stuart Blackton

1935: William Dieterle, Max Reinhardt

1968: Peter Hall

1981: Elijah Moshinsky

1982: Joseph Papp, Emile Ardolino

1996: Adrian Noble

1999: Michael Hoffman

2010: Bo Bergstrom

2014: Dominic Dromgoole

2014: Julie Taymor

2016: Maxine Peake

2016: Emma Rice

2017: Casey Wilder Mott


Adaptations

1992: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Animated)

2005: ShakespeaRe-Told: A Midsummer Night’s Dream


Related

2015: Shakespeare Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 4


A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2016: Maxine Peake

Maxine Peake has here reinvented A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a social and political screed, taking aim at all manner of things in the lexicon of the currently relevant. In the process, it makes it a Midsummer Night’s Dream for the present, at the cost of any claim to timelessness.

From the very opening scenes, the narrative is wrenched out of any reasonable frame. Theseus is overtly presented as an unequivocal and unredeemable villain. He’s depicted as a Fascist dictator, in a way reminiscent of Julie Taymor’s Titus or Richard Longcraine’s Richard III. The difference seems to be that while the connection was meaningful in Titus, and marginally relevant in Richard III (both of which are at least largely about political power), here it’s arbitrary and distracting.

Shakespeare’s Theseus is an ambivalent character; Peake’s is not. This is not because Shakespeare is unaware of the problems. Shakespeare’s Theseus certainly has a capricious approach to enforcing the law: while at the outset he pleads that he may “in no way extenuate” its harsh terms, by the end he is willing to overrule Egeus on the very same issue. Perhaps more to the point, he has won Hippolyta by force, which is obviously repugnant and invites some pronouncement from the #metoo generation. But one doesn’t have to favor a tyrannical male sexuality to realize that at least in the mythology that Shakespeare was drawing on, this is almost irrelevant. Hippolyta was the queen of the Amazons, and in the play she makes no protest at all about the fact that she was won by force. Maybe she should have — and had Shakespeare said anything about it, one could deal with those terms. But bringing her onto the scene in a padlocked strait-jacket seems primarily there for the sake of virtue-signalling — lest we consider, even for a moment, that he could possibly be anything other than a villain, and so that we might not have to do the harder work of thinking about him for ourselves. And just to seal the deal on this heavy-handed and bullying dramaturgy (since it’s the only possible proper outcome for such a reprehensible character in the view of this kind of political correctness) Theseus is made to die at the end of the play. There are of course neither lines nor stage directions to support that, but Peake has him wordlessly exit the performance of the Pyramus and Thisbe play, clutching at his chest, and we watch him expiring, alone and unlamented, in the hallway outside the banquet-hall while a throng of vindictive fairies look gleefully on and one of his lieutenants pointedly ignores the surveillance video.

Considerable ink was apparently expended when the production first aired on BBC because it featured at the end a same-sex kiss between Titania and Hippolyta (both of whom now, for some reason, have sprouted butterfly wings in psychedelic colors). This seems a trifling matter next to the overall aesthetic the play embodies. There is of course nothing in Shakespeare’s play to suggest a homosexual undertone to the character of Hippolyta (unless one must assume that an Amazon culture would necessarily be lesbian — something ancient sources never really suggest), but it’s all part and parcel of an avowed program to make this old play adhere to an unquestioned and unquestionable twenty-first-century progressive dogma. Whatever does not fit that standard must apparently be either sanitized to make it acceptable, or stigmatized to make it clear that we are not only entitled but required to disapprove of it.

Along the same lines, in a singularly inept bit of staging and rewriting, in the middle of the play Demetrius is made to fall in love briefly with Lysander, though of course very shortly his affections need to be redirected toward Helena if the play is to proceed on anything like the original course. This ham-handedly involves repeating a sequence of lines, while everyone looks on uncomfortably. It seems to serve no purpose other than to put us on notice that same-sex liaisons are perfectly fine now, and that these are among the options open to a legitimate interpretation of a sixteenth-century play. The fact that it’s entirely gratuitous in dramatic context is of no account; what’s apparently important is hammering home its social message.

In technical terms, this is a well-made production. The actors almost all do a good job. Some odd production design features intrude. The fact that Lysander looks for all the world like a grown-up (if slightly more androgynous) version of Harry Potter is just strange. The leader of the rude mechanicals in their dramatic enterprise is now a woman, and though it is not clear why, it’s also not clear that it (or much of anything else) matters in this play. The rationale that sets Oberon and Titania initially at odds is not clear at all.

If you are looking for a production of the play that will bludgeon it into a modern political framework and make sure that none of the latest progressive orthodoxy will be violated or questioned, this film is probably just the ticket. It trumpets all the politically correct sentiments, as if establishing the dramaturge’s progressive doctrinal purity were the primary point of any drama. It’s virtue-signalling dressed up as a play, another piece of shallow punditry for the age of Facebook, Twitter, and the banal politics that grow from them. As a representation of Shakespeare, though, it is not merely flawed but aggressively and adroitly bad.


Bottom: Matt Lucas

Cobweb: Charlotte Blake

Cobweb: Charlotte Dylan

Courtier (uncredited): Sarah Sharman

Dancer: Ceri-Ann Williams

Demetrius: Paapa Essiedu

Egeus: Colin McFarlane

Flute: Fisayo Akinade

Guard: Samuel Rush

Helena: Kate Kennedy

Hermia: Prisca Bakare

Hippolyta: Eleanor Matsuura

Lysander: Matthew Tennyson

Mistress Quince: Elaine Paige

Moth: Tia Benbow-Hart

Mustardseed: Marlene Madenge

Oberon: Nonso Anozie

Peaseblossom: Varada Sethu

Philostrate: Elliot Levey

Puck: Hiran Abeysekera

Snout: Bernard Cribbins

Snug: Javone Prince

Starveling: Richard Wilson

Theseus: John Hannah

Titania: Maxine Peake