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
Buy A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Amazon on DVD.
Buy A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Amazon on Blu-ray.