A Midsummer Night's Dream (24 page)

Robin Goodfellow is a kind of stage manager, isn't he? Shakespeare loved writing parts of that kind (Iago, Prospero, and Ariel, the Duke in
Measure for Measure
). Were there particular moments in your production that emphasized this aspect of the Puck's role?

Boyd:
Puck would make a disastrous stage manager. He's much more of a Bottom than a stage manager. His egotistical lust for messing about in human lives is only matched by Bottom's egotistical urge to play every part in life. Iago may have liked to think of himself as Puck, but he was in fact a much meaner-spirited, smaller character. Aidan McArdle physically manipulated the lovers like a drunken Tadeusz Kantor [the revolutionary Polish artist and theater director]. He rode them, he beat them, and emptied buckets of earth on them. He has more uncomplicated, unguilty relish than either Prospero, Ariel, or the Duke.

Doran:
Yes. As all the fairies become obsessed with the humans, he of course becomes obsessed with the rude mechanicals. He not only messes up the love potion, deliberately or otherwise, he also thoroughly enjoys involving himself in the play and turning Bottom into
a literal ass. In a way you don't have to emphasize the stage manager role because it's very clearly there.

Supple:
Yes, many. Philostrate starts the production, walking slowly to the front center and playing a strange, singing stone that starts the whole dream off. He sits at the front and watches the mechanicals in 1.2, transforming in front of our eyes into Puck as the stage transforms into the forest. He orchestrates the violent entanglement of the lovers in 3.2 by spinning a web of elastic around them and he signals both the start and the end of the interval. As Philostrate he sounds the hunting horns that wake Titania and Oberon up into Hippolyta and Theseus and, also as Philostrate, he makes the stage fit for Act 5. In the blessing dance he transforms again to Puck while Hippolyta and Theseus are transforming into their spirit alter egos. This all, of course, leads to the most wonderful fruition in the play when Puck offers the audience a simple understanding of the complex picture that has unfurled in front of their eyes: the actors are the shadows, the play a series of visions, and the experience of the event was itself only a dream.

Quince, Bottom, and friends: their play has got to be bad, but you don't want the theater audience to condescend to them, as some members of the onstage audience do during the performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” How did you deal with this problem, how conceive the play-within-the-play?

Boyd:
We always remembered that the mechanicals were a loving grotesque of Shakespeare's own chosen profession, and ours. The naïveté of Quince's play and the mechanicals' stagecraft is just a comic rendering of the absurdity of our attempts to capture life in play form. Their imagination and their open hearts more than make up for their mistakes. They are the classic comic apologia to a potentially offended courtly audience: “Don't arrest us or close down our play: we're just a bunch of humble actors, who are a threat to nobody.”

Doran:
The rude mechanicals are intending to do the play as well as they can, they're just not very good. What we looked at, rather than
a lot of comic business, was the moments we remembered from starting out in amateur theater. Those moments of excruciating embarrassment when something unplanned happened. Costumes dropping off, or, as I remember in panto in Lancashire, the vicar's teeth falling out. It's in the attempts to cover it up and keep on doing it well that terrible things happen. That was what made it funny.

We looked at the dirty jokes, which are a crucial part of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” but are a very difficult part to play because the verbal jokes tend not to work. Terms like “stones” and “hole” don't quite register nowadays in the context of the play. We addressed that very specifically by making a costume go wrong. The chink has been demonstrated in the rehearsal in the forest as Snout holding his fingers to form a chink. But I don't think when it comes to the performance of the play in front of the duke that the chink being fingers allows the stones and hole jokes to work. So we imagined that Snout, in creating his wall costume—we used a laundry basket covered in lime and plaster, so he did look like a wall—had forgotten to provide a hole through which he could put his hand. So he had to lift it, which exposed his Y-fronts. As he turned to face Pyramus and Thisbe they were faced with either the front of the Y-fronts or the back of the Y-fronts, which led to the excruciating embarrassment of Flute and Bottom as they had to say these lines about kissing the wall's hole, or referring to his stones knit up “with lime and hair.” It was their embarrassment about having to carry on, faced with this big red pair of Y-fronts, that produced the fun. But it was based on a real sense of the embarrassment of being onstage when something goes wrong, rather than trying to invent comic business which isn't really there.

Supple:
Firstly, does it have to be bad? Or if so, how bad? And in what way bad? I would only say for sure that it needs to be artless. It must be, truthfully, a play performed by people who have not done plays—apart from one who started the play thinking that he knows more than he does about plays and acting. But has not even Bottom undergone some change, some transformation? Certainly also the language of “Pyramus and Thisbe” has many mistaken uses of English and crude examples of rhyme, meter, and vocabulary. But I am not
sure how important the quality of the performance is. The most important questions that we asked about the play-within-the-play were the same as we would ask about any scene: what are they doing, for what end, and with what result? To answer this we made the simple decision to take the mechanicals as seriously as any characters in the play. We thought of them, in detail, as traders and craftsmen. We observed all the details we could from the text of what might be their work, their lives, their social status, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with theater. And we looked for how all these details might change through the course of the story. We were trying to escape from one of the most odious (or “odorous!”) habits of the
Dream
in performance: to see the mechanicals as “comic relief” and their play as an excuse for endless directorial and actorly invention of ways in which these thoughtful, struggling men can be made to look foolish or cute. We tried several versions of their “Pyramus and Thisbe,” each one an attempt to imagine just how they would do it given they have no money and little art, and indeed have had no time to rehearse as their first and last rehearsal was interrupted by Bottom's transformation. We thought about what kinds of theater they would have seen—probably theater from the street—and how this would inform their choices. Most of all, we thought about who they are and who they have become by the end of the play. In the end, our version has no mistakes, no invented business—rather, it attempts to reveal in a bare and honest way the experiences of those six men performing at the wedding of the most powerful monarch in their universe.

In terms of theater, I find their journey fascinating and moving and I feel that their version of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is as interesting a passage about theater as the players' visit to
Hamlet
's Elsinore. Indeed it should be: Shakespeare has chosen to place it at the end. He has chosen it to be the climax of his action. After the performance there is the magnificent finale of the burgomasque, the exit of the couples to their sexual union, and then the blessing song and dance. This remarkable ending demands that the conclusion of the action before be of greater resonance and value than a bad play that makes us laugh. It needs to be, in some way, a conclusion.
Perhaps an epiphany. Or at least an arrival. The mechanicals' journey from first meeting to performance via the forest is one in which they discover theater for themselves. In their first scene they encounter the basic fears that anyone may hold about performance. Will they become foolish? Will their limitations be exposed? Most of all, will their performance scare their aristocratic audience and lead to their punishment? There is little collective instinct in this first scene. There is conflict between the writer/director and the leading actor—a struggle for leadership—and there are individual issues and anxieties. In the forest this reaches a head. They confront the basic problems of theater: how to reassure the audience that it is not real (prologue) and how to make moonlight and a wall appear in an indoor room. The imaginative solutions that first Quince, then Bottom, propose—that both can be symbolized, simply, by an actor—bring the group together. In the first rehearsal, Flute has to learn the very basic dynamics of drama. Bottom's transformation into an ass drives a juggernaut through the play rehearsals but will ultimately ignite inspiration into its core. Firstly, the other men realize how much they value him and how much the play meant to them all. They will express this eloquently in 4.2. Secondly, Bottom becomes the only mortal of the play to cross over to the other side—to become the lover of the Queen of the Fairies. Titania promises him that she will purge his mortal spirit so that he will “like an airy spirit go.” This is fulfilled in the performance. When he awakes, his wonder, and sense of the remarkable mystery that he has experienced, is immediately translated into artistic thinking: he will perform a ballad of his dream. When he returns to the group he has new dignity and poise. Now he can be truly believed as the natural leader he earlier imagined himself to be. In performance of the play he anchors a great achievement. They do it. And not only do they do it, each one of them masters some great challenge: Quince follows a disastrous first prologue with a cogent and passionate second; Snout is strong and dignified as Wall; Snug charms the ladies with eloquence and humility; Starveling overcomes terrible teasing to insist on his role; Flute takes on the female role with tremendous vigor. And Bottom is so inspired in his death that he imagines that his “soul is in the sky.” However crude, however artless, surely something must occur, something must be stirred?

6.
Pyramus (Joy Fernandes), Wall (Umesh Jagtap), and Thisbe (Joyraj Bhattacharya) in Tim Supple's production.

The workmen offer the aristocrats a play about the play we have just seen. In the dim recesses of their memory or dream, they and we must be somehow affected by the honesty and directness they bring to the center of the experience.

Tell us about your Bottom: the largest part (!), the most foolish character, but in his way the wisest, certainly the most lovable, but it's crucial to avoid sentimentality toward him, isn't it? And the specific choice of how to do his ass's head: a pair of ears and maybe a comic nose is one thing, a fully realistic animal head quite another. What did you go for? And would you say that this costuming decision plays a major part in determining whether the stage image of Bottom making love to Titania is
essentially comical, politically subversive (a weaver making love to a queen!), or perverse and grotesque in the manner of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
(a beautiful woman having sex with a donkey)?

Boyd:
Our Bottom opened the door to the transforming wood with the real force of his imaginative arrow. He and Puck were the
two
Lords of Misrule. He reminded Titania what happiness was, and provided an inspirational leader to the duke's Players. Daniel Ryan's Bottom's Pyramus was actually very good; it was just over-inventive and needed a stronger editor, a more forceful director, than Quince. A full donkey's head (as I had in Sheffield) is too literal and restricts the actor and risks us losing contact with him for too long. Big ears and a powerful groin are the only essential elements. Shakespeare clearly intends to refer to primitive bestiality as well as to subversive Lord of Misrule in Bottom's lovemaking with Titania. We had one foolish teacher who walked his children out of the theater and gained notoriety and a
Guardian
editorial defending us.

Doran:
I think with Bottom you have to have a sense of a good-natured braggart. He is absolutely determined to play the biggest part, and all the other parts, which could make him completely intolerable. But then he is faced with this extraordinary fantasy of being wooed by, presumably, the most beautiful, glamorous creature he has ever seen. I remember when I was just starting out as a director, I did the play in a community college in upstate New York. I went to do a seminar on the play in the psychology department and somebody asked me if I felt it was suitable for the students. When I asked why, they said, “Well, jealous husband makes wife have it off with donkey. Isn't that a rather disturbing message?” Of course that is true, in that there is a weirdly subversive sexual nonsense that goes on. But I think it's so funny because Bottom is who Bottom is. If you play with the element of the play's dark sexuality as being as psychologically complex and dangerous as that, I think you're in danger of tipping the whole play over. I think he plays it with a sort of wit and lightness. I think if you really investigate what Oberon has done, when Titania wakes up and realizes “I just had it off with a donkey,” then I don't think there would be any measure of reconciliation between them. There is an exuberant, primal, primitive joy about the
whole thing. That's where it becomes a most fantastical dream: where things start morphing into different shapes and it becomes weird and wonderful. I think there is a darkness to it, but a Jan Kott level of darkness just topples the play.