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
2014: Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor is well-known for extravagant theatrical artifice; she’s most famous for the Broadway version of The Lion King and her stage and film version of Titus Andronicus (just under the name Titus). This version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a film of a stage production, and an astonishing production it is. It achieves a level of surrealism that is almost itself the star of the performance. Surely no other Shakespeare play is more fit for this kind of psychedelic treatment, and Taymor takes the license to an extreme. She uses intense saturated colors of every hue, makes extraordinary use of yards of billowing fabric, conjures forests from clusters of bamboo staves and generally warps time and space.

The sound design is similarly adventurous: on stage actors use whirly tubes (known to P. D. Q. Bach fans as the lasso d’amore) and didgeridoos for their unearthly but haunting sounds, while some scenes are accompanied by a carnival harmonium or something like it, evoking the sense of the carnival fairway. (The use of the whirly tubes, however, was apparently anticipated in 1970 by Peter Brook’s “white box” theater vision of the play.)

Altogether it is a showcase of what one can do in a live performance with really inventive stagecraft. This is not without its limitations: the fact is that what is entirely magical on stage is not necessarily as magical on film: if one imagines oneself at the performance where these extraordinary stage tricks take place, it is likely that it would be compellingly persuasive. It is not invariably so on film, and yet it is in many places extraordinarily beautiful. Combined with genuinely solid acting throughout, this is a remarkable theatrical experience.

Happily, the acting is not eclipsed, but heightened in this treatment. None of the roles is badly covered, and a few deserve special mention.

Puck is more than normally central to this production of the play, and the part is played by Kathryn Hunter. She may be best known to modern audiences as Arabella Figg from the Harry Potter movies, but she has built her career as a virtuosic physical actress, and here she does not disappoint: she is a phenomenally limber and acrobatic player who rides waves of stage fabric, is hoisted into the air on ropes and pulleys, leaps and mugs incessantly, configures her body in outlandish ways, and somehow manages to seem natural while doing so. Puck is canonically a male character, of course, but he’s defined chiefly as a functionary, and is potentially somewhat epicene for all that, so the change of gender here is a minor matter. If there were nothing else worth observing in this production, her performance would be justification enough.

The most potentially problematic roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I think, are Oberon and Titania: though they are not in every respect the dramatic center of the play, they are, in a sense, the motivators of the action. When they are weak, the whole production feels slack and unpersuasive. (This was my chief objection to the Michael Hoffman version: neither Rupert Everett nor Michelle Pfeiffer quite made me believe in them.) Here, however, both David Harewood and Tina Benko are fully in command of their lines — both their meaning and their music — and they communicate a sense of elemental power that’s quite arresting. (Benko also plays Sydney in The Scottish Play, and is a delight there as well.)

The four lovers are also charming and (usefully) easily distinguished from one another; similarly Theseus and Hippolyta are played with some genuine gravity. The final Pyramus and Thisbe episode is full of slapstick, yet still tinged with the tragedy that underlies the story.

I would not recommend it as the first exposure of any viewer to the play, but it is definitely worth seeing.


Demetrius: Zach Appelman

Duke Theseus: Roger Clark

Francis Flute: Zachary Infante

Helena: Mandi Masden

Hermia: Lilly Englert

Lord Egeus: Robert Langdon Lloyd

Lysander: Jake Horowitz

Nick Bottom: Max Casella

Oberon: David Harewood

Peter Quince: Joe Grifasi

Puck: Kathryn Hunter

Queen Hippolyta: Okwui Okpokwasili

Robin Starveling: William Youmans

Rude Elemental: Alex Shimizu

Rude Elemental: Azalea Twining

Rude Elemental: Briana Robinson

Rude Elemental: Cassidy VanVonno

Rude Elemental: Christina Dimanche

Rude Elemental: Ciaran Bowling

Rude Elemental: Isaiah Register

Rude Elemental: Jake L. Faragalli

Rude Elemental: Jarrett Austin Brown

Rude Elemental: Jaryd Farcon

Rude Elemental: Johnny Marx

Rude Elemental: Jon Viktor Corpuz

Rude Elemental: Madison Smith

Rude Elemental: Marcus Bellamy

Rude Elemental: Olivia Bak

Rude Elemental: Reimi Kaneko

Rude Elemental: Sophia Lillis

Rude Elemental: Sophie Shapiro

Rude Elemental: Willa Scolari

Snug: Brendan Averett

Titania: Tina Benko

Tom Stout: Jacob Ming-Trent