We are haunted this year by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have seen three productions already, and missed three more, all of which were startlingly different.
Erica Whyman’s RSC production was subtitled “A Play for the Nation” and, in employing amateur actors as the mechanicals, caught the communal spirit of a war-torn 1940s Britain. Trevor Nunn, meanwhile, set his New Wolsey, Ipswich revival in 1930s colonial India and highlighted the tensions of race and class. A third version by Go People at Southwark Playhouse used just seven actors, had a calculated rough-theatre quality and depended heavily on audience interaction.
It is a measure of The Dream’s greatness that it is open to any number of possibilities. But seeing Lynne Hockney’s revival of Peter Hall’s 1981 production of Benjamin Britten’s opera at Glyndebourne opened my eyes to yet another vision.
Britten’s opera is his response to Shakespeare’s play. A startling realisation was that Britten – who composed the opera in seven months in 1959 – anticipated the Polish critic Jan Kott, who in his 1964 book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, detected in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the madness of love and a dark eroticism. All of this is perfectly realised in the Hall production.
Elizabeth Bury, who worked with her husband, John, on the original designs, says in the programme that the production is “hard and sharp and cruel and funny”, but those are all qualities that Britten found in Shakespeare’s play. This is certainly the most sinister Dream I have seen. Britten’s version plunges us straight into the forest; the opening series of glissando chords establish it as a place of unearthly magic, and the composer’s decision to cast a countertenor (currently the excellent Tim Mead) as Oberon adds to the sense of otherworldliness. There is also a savage vindictiveness about Britten’s Oberon that you don’t find in most productions: the score underlines the way he gloats on his plan to streak the eyes of Tytania and make her full of “hateful fantasies”.
There is, of course, humour in Britten’s version: by being staged as a Donizetti parody, the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play is genuinely funny and far from the strenuous gagfest we often get. But, with Britten, one is always conscious of the darker forces within the play’s magic. It was an inspired idea of Britten to cast Puck as a speaking role for a young boy, and at Glyndebourne the part is taken with staggering assurance by the eight-year-old David Evans. Although he was a joy to watch, I was reminded of a point made by Humphrey Carpenter in his biography of Britten – that there are strong echoes in the Oberon-Puck relationship of Quint and the boy Miles in The Turn of the Screw. It is Quint who seeks a boy “slick as a juggler’s mate to catch my thought”, but the words could well be Oberon’s.
What is moving about this operatic Dream is that it is the work of Hall and bears many of his trademarks. When he first directed Shakespeare’s play at Stratford in 1959, he set it in an Elizabethan country-house invaded by immortals. He uses the same effect here when, as the lovers all retire to their nuptial beds, the windows of Theseus’s palace open to reveal the shimmering spectral presence of the fairies. It was a moment of pure magic and set the seal on an opera that shows Britten not only responding to Shakespeare, but revealing, in a way few straight productions do, the play’s crepuscular strangeness.