A Midsummer Night's Dream (23 page)

Though it requires some very quick costume changes, many productions double Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania. Did yours? Why? Why not? Gains and losses, discoveries?

Boyd:
We were bound to double them as our premise was that the woods were a transforming agent on Athenian life, permitting the release of repressed or taboo ideas and urges. The biggest single gain was the moving and dangerous moment when Bottom approached Hippolyta in the burgomasque dance. Both of them half understood what they had each “dreamed” the night before. The humanizing of Nick Jones as Theseus through Oberon was also powerful.

Doran:
We didn't. The reason was that it has actually become the norm to double them. It's fine for Oberon and Titania, but the worry I had was that Hippolyta and Theseus are rather diminished. You stop regarding them in their own right, and I wanted to look at them in their own capacities and at their own agendas, to try to understand who they are. There's a physical moment which is very difficult, because you have to have an extraordinarily quick change when they go off and come straight back on again, which seems to indicate to me that it was not the original purpose to double them. Rather than effect a clever quick change I decided not to have that at all and to try and look at them in their own right. I think that brought distinct advantages theatrically. One problem is that, when you get to the moment when Oberon and Titania are reconciled, which I think is an incredibly important moment in the play, then that moment becomes loaded with the practical issue of how you are going to do the quick change. When the fairies come back on right at the end of the play after Theseus and Hippolyta and the lovers have all gone off to bed, and there is a sense of the play coming to an end,
I think not doubling the roles increases the audience's sense of wonder and delight. There's a growing sense of joy there, and I love the fact that Oberon and Titania do come back to enter the palace. The danger is that if Theseus and Hippolyta do another quick change you are more aware of the quick change than you are of the wonder of the moment. There's a sense of benediction at the end of the play. It shows it clearly wasn't just a dream after all. The fairies' role has been reestablished as somehow preservers of the natural order and their benediction of the mothers and the newlyweds was somehow more special without the doubling.

Supple:
We did double Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania as well as Philostrate with Puck. Even Egeus appears in the forest as a spirit. It seemed absolutely natural to do this on the page and it feels absolutely natural in performance. The reasons are numerous. The perfect structure of the play invites it: the mortal court disappears from view for the middle three acts, leaving its key actors idle if they are not to reappear as the spirit-court. Without this doubling, Theseus and Hippolyta have no process of change or travel: the doubling creates a rich physical and psychological experience at the heart of the play. The core meaning of the play lies in transformation and the forest is the place of change. The lovers transform with wild and released ferocity into sexual animals. Bottom of course transforms into the ultimate sexual beast—the compliant ass. Becoming Titania and Oberon is the transformation undergone by Hippolyta and Theseus. As the spirit-monarchs, they too are released from the restraining forces of civilized society. They can fight their way with no holds barred through the painful, turbulent forest of sexual jealousy, marital power, and mutual frustration. Like all classic folktales, the time and place of transformation is elsewhere and must be forgotten to the conscious mind. Bottom cannot hold on to the memory of his experience in the forest, nor can the lovers. How much more rich is this sense of dream if it is common to all the characters in the play? Hippolyta and Theseus' dream is to have been Titania and Oberon. This makes the stage one and binds the audience into a sensation of dream: “That you have but slumbered here / While these visions did
appear.” What losses there might be is hard to guess at—one would have to play the play the other way to discover. The most obvious loss would be a greater sense of concrete, discreet character in each mortal and each immortal. One might gain a sense of travel—of leaving the court, the city, and entering another, very different world. It would allow extreme differences in casting. One could even play with the two worlds colliding more often. Indeed we can surmise that in Shakespeare's time the mechanicals doubled with the fairies. This completes the dream, the surrealism of the mortal world becoming the immortal world. However, we definitely wanted mechanicals who would bring a reality to the stage and who would convince as workingmen from India's streets. This demanded a very different kind of performer and physical personality to those we cast as fairies. Having two different groups produced a vivid contrast between them and created a rich human canvas. It also allowed two wonderful events of meeting: 3.1 and the end.

Hermia and Helena are sharply differentiated, not least by their differing height, but sometimes the boys seem indistinguishable—there are moments when even seasoned playgoers can be hard put to remember who is in love with whom at which moment. That's partly the Puck's fault, of course, but would you say that the director needs to work especially hard to help actors realize Demetrius and Lysander distinctively?

Boyd:
There's no excuse for confusing the characters of Lysander and Demetrius. Lysander is clearly a passionate rebel, prone to fits of melancholy. His vivid sense of mortality and his wooing techniques bring readily to mind the young John Donne: the young outsider courtier of the wrong persuasion. He's one of many trainee Hamlets. Demetrius, on the other hand, is a trainee Laertes. He has a passion in him, but it is buried, and takes second place to the main chance. The
Dream
could, in one sense, be subtitled “The Awakening and Education of Demetrius.” He's the one lover who is truly and permanently transformed by the experience, and it is a good thing that he ends up a little more like Lysander.

Doran:
I think there is a distinct psychology behind all of them. Hermia and Helena are not just distinguished by their heights. Hermia is this spoilt little princess, who has always been the apple of her important father's eye, who has lived this very privileged existence and has had everything she wants, including the love of Lysander. She's a very determined little madam. I think she uses Lysander, who at the beginning of the play you can absolutely understand as the person that Hermia's father would not want to hang around his daughter. He's a bit of a wastrel. We had him physically sloppier. He's interested in love and the language of love. He's a sort of philosopher in his own mind, whereas Demetrius
is
the man Hermia's father wants her to marry. He is a city type, a Hooray Henry. The advantage of having the boys in modern dress is that you can have certain signifiers for an audience. If Demetrius is dressed rather uptight, neatly cut hair, city suit, the Man Most Likely To, then you can distinguish him very clearly from Lysander, who wears rather romantic sloppy clothes and has long hair. Hermia is the princess. Helena is paranoid about her height and has rather low self-esteem. What the forest does is expose those paranoias. Hermia, who has always had love and just had to click her fingers for it to come to her, is suddenly abandoned, loved by neither of the men and left wandering around the forest by herself. I think that's very frightening for her. I don't think she's ever had to fall back on her own resources like that before. Helena is a bit of a masochist who has fallen comfortably into the position of playing the victim in life. Her problem is partially that she enjoys playing the victim. She says “But herein mean I to enrich my pain.” It's an almost masochistic enjoyment of not being loved, proving that she is not worthy of love by chasing the wrong partner. Yet in the forest she finds herself being chased and adored by two men. Initially she finds it rather disturbing—they must be joking—and then she finds that there are certain advantages, and a certain power struggle evolves because of that. Lysander might be a bit soppy but he does hold true to his love. The revelation at the end comes when Demetrius admits that he has behaved badly, and from being a very arrogant man he becomes a very humble man. All of them have their true selves exposed in the forest. A mirror is held up exposing who they really are and it's very disturbing to see, but they
come out of the forest with a better sense of vision. Their vision might be blurry initially, but ultimately they see each other and themselves much more clearly as a result of the night in the forest.

Supple:
As usual Shakespeare sits finely poised between ancient and modern theatrical tastes with very interesting results. Actually the two boys are quite distinct in their actions and words—and they are different to each other both before and after the flower. Lysander is an idealist: a love warrior. His cult is love as he has read, thought, and dreamt of it. He shows courage and the instincts of an adventurer in his pursuit of fidelity: suggesting elopement for marriage and restraining his lust for Hermia in the forest when she calls on him to do so. The flower of course reveals his other side: with Helena he releases his lust, ferocity, and cruelty. It becomes urgent for him to have Helena, destroy Demetrius, and crush Hermia.

Demetrius begins the play as the unreliable, opportunistic outsider of the four. He has loved Helena and ditched her, leaving her distraught, having transferred his desire onto Hermia despite her clear commitment to Lysander. He does not share the trysts and tales referred to by the other three. His reaction to their flight is wild: he will catch and kill Lysander just as Hermia is killing him. He threatens Helena with savagery and rape if she does not leave him alone. He tries to seduce Hermia when she is clearly distraught—allowing her to believe that he has killed Lysander. The effect of the flower is to allow him to worship Helena—he becomes less obsessed with seduction and more with defending her, in his eyes, against the false love of Lysander. After the calming, transforming sleep of the dark hours before dawn, this tangle of feelings is transformed into the deep, rich, devotional love he declares publicly in 4.1. These differences in word and deed must all be fully explored and exploited and made available to an audience. However, in performance the differences are superficial and the two characters remain stubbornly interchangeable. On the one hand I tend to agree with Jan Kott that there is core meaning here. The kind of love that concerns Shakespeare in the play, and in the forest especially, is not the romantic love that tells us that one true partner awaits us as in the final credits of the Hollywood Rom-Com. This is the tougher, more truthful face of young love when a partner
can switch in the course of a night. When one's passion for one partner can evaporate in the dark when encouraged to turn its head to another. It is no villainy in Demetrius that his “shower of oaths did melt” when it felt “some heat” from Hermia. It is no villainy in Hermia either. It is just desire. And the
Dream
is about that part of love that is desire and the forest is the arena where desire can finally rule, unrestrained by family, responsibility, fidelity, marriage, or time. In such a place, one partner is much like another and in our heart of hearts this is the truth we feel when we glance at stranger after stranger and wonder. In these moments of our life—especially in our youth—many partners are possible and anything can happen. On the other hand, the similarity we feel in the two is a result of their theatrical ancestry. The four lovers are in part developments of the lovers of
commedia dell'arte
, struggling through trials, largely created by a difficult father (Egeus). The stories, actions, and expression of these lovers were very much to type and the scene between Hermia and Lysander at the end of 1.1 is especially influenced by the genre. Shakespeare's genius is to retain enough of the genre to appeal to his audience but to discover enough unique psychology in each character to allow them to live for modern audiences. His further genius is to create a group of six workingmen who, though less explored and revealed than his aristocratic lovers, are actually more individually defined.

And the girls: do we need them to feel real pain, real fear, not just of rejection but of rape?

Boyd:
Yes. The woods are no less hilarious for being terrifying.

Doran:
I think that's right. The comedy of the play has to come out of a reality. It does descend into a fight, but that's not funny if they are not real people. I think there are moments of incredible revelation and shock. Hermia turns to Lysander and says “What, can you do me greater harm than hate?” If you just treat these as funny scenes and funny characters and don't investigate them properly, they won't be funny. But they are funny if you have rooted their desires in reality. Helena's sense of victimization is actually deeply disturbing. She says “Use me but as your spaniel.” That girl needs
therapy! Unless you get into the reality of that neurosis, the psychological abstraction of the forest doesn't work.

Supple:
Of course: real everything! Pain, fear, abandonment, rape, but most of all terror in the face of themselves. Where do they end up by 3.2? Helena with no self-esteem, wishing only that “sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, / Steal me awhile from mine own company.” Hermia, abandoned by best friend and devoted lover, trying to rip out Helena's eyes. The forest confronts each character with their most secret desire and fear of themselves. And surely this portrait would not be true if it did not include at least one moment in which Hermia did not want Demetrius and Helena Lysander? Helena cannot have entirely fabricated her image of Hermia sending out “some heat” to Demetrius. And the flower juice is not, of course, a magical potion but a force of super-nature, as simply symbolic as Cupid's arrow. It brings about what is in our hearts.