Read Online A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online

repertoire, the difficulty for any director is to find new and interesting settings that will emphasize and add to the play’s meaning rather than just decorate it. There is also the dilemma of trying to show a correlation between and a melding of the mortal and fairy worlds.
    The traditional wooded glade was already beginning to fade from twentieth-century visions of the
Dream
when Peter Brook blew away all previous conceptions, conventions, and clichés with a radically different staging concept. What he called his “celebration of theater” put emphasis on the artificiality of the medium, and demonstrated the impossibility of designing a representational world for the play that a modern audience would believe in. The stage became a blank sheet on which the actors made their own magic through the art of theater itself. Brook’s designer, Sally Jacobs, recalled:
    Peter wanted to investigate all the ideas of the play, such as the variations on the theme of love, with a group of actors—always inter-relating so that they could play each other’s parts—in a very small, very intimate acting area. So the story would remain clear. It wouldn’t be blown up into a big production number, with fogs, forests, and Athens, and all of that pretence. We would just keep it very, very simple and make it a presentation of actors performing a play. In doing “The Dream” that way, we could let it be surprising, inconsistent, the source material always being the text rather than a “scheme.” 19
    Jacobs designed a three-sided white box set, which was held in a constant white light so no trick could go unmissed. Darkness was removed from the forest and the action and characters thrown into sharp relief. The play opened without the traditional safety curtain (something we are used to now, but which was out of the ordinary at the time), with the full company juggling and tumbling. The set was seen variously by reviewers as a child’s play box, “a squash court, a clinic, a scientific research station, an operating theater, a gymnasium and a big top … Two doors were cut in the back wall, two slits in the sides, two ladders set at the downstage edges, and a gallery orcatwalk round its top [allowing] the musicians and fairies to gaze down at the players.” 20 The symmetry of the set with the doubling of the characters emphasized Hermia’s words when she comes out of the “dream,” “everything seems double.” It also created an intense and intimate space where the tension never let up.
    Brook’s device for distinguishing the different worlds was simple. There was no change in setting; the characters wore long robes in the Athenian court which they quickly removed to reveal their fairy-world costumes, like circus performers readying themselves for action. On leaving the forest at the end of the play the actors simply put the robes back on. Brook was keen to stress that the fairies, the aristocrats, and the mechanicals did not occupy different worlds but were facets of the same world. “The more one examines the play, the more one sees how these worlds interweave,” he said. 21 Irving Wardle, reviewing the production, commented:
    It provides an environment for the
Dream
which removes the sense of being earthbound: it is natural here for characters to fly … Brook’s company give the play a continuously animated physical line, occupying the whole cubic space of the stage and they ship up and down ladders and stamp about in enormous stilts … We are accustomed to seeing them as inhabitants of different worlds. Brook shows them as members of the same world. Egeus’s loss of his daughter is matched by Oberon’s loss of his Indian boy. “This same progeny of evils comes from our debate,” says Titania; and as Sara Kestelman delivers it, reclining on the huge scarlet ostrich feather that serves as her