20 June 2019
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Bridge Theatre.
Reviewed by Neil Tidmarsh
We laugh, rightly, at the eighteenth century’s convention of reworking Shakespeare to give his tragedies a happy ending. I wonder if future generations will similarly laugh at our age’s reworking of Shakespeare to make his drama conform to the conventions of current gender politics?
Interpretation is one thing but distortion is quite another. Distortion is a dangerous and often uncontrollable business, as Nicholas Hytner’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream proves. The determination of this production to conform to fashionable ideology is so powerful that it sacrifices coherence and, moreover, backfires quite disastrously. What begins as a feminist reworking ends up as something far from politically correct (and I’m not referring to the racist and sexist demonisation of white male heterosexuality) – it descends into homophobic comedy.
I’m certain that this is completely unintended – it’s simply an accidental and unfortunate (but actually quite logical and predictable) by-product of this production’s narrative vandalism. The play, irritated by the distortions, has turned on Hytner and bitten him on the ankles.
Theseus, inevitably, is presented as a symbol of the cruel and hated patriarchy. This is already a cliché of modern productions of this play, of course, but Hytner takes it two steps further. The actors playing Theseus and Hippolyta also play Oberon and Titania, so the combat between the mortal king and queen (in this production, still very much a thing of the present and not of the past) is played out as the combat between the fairy king and queen. So far so good – sending Theseus’s and Hippolyta’s alter egos to fight it out in the virtual reality of the Athenian wood is rather like computer-gamers sending their avatars to fight it out in the virtual reality of cyberspace. Oberon’s and Titania’s story is Theseus’s and Hippolyta’s dream about themselves.
But then things become problematic. Hytner gives Oberon’s lines and actions to Titania, and Titania’s lines and actions to Oberon. So Titania, not Oberon, is in control of the proceedings; she’s the one in charge of Puck and the magic potions; she’s the one who wreaks revenge on Oberon, and not vice versa. Hang on, you think, that means…. Yes, indeed, car crash approaching. The fact that we’re now watching not Shakespeare’s but Hytner’s A Midsummer Nights’ Dream is the least of it. Because it means – yes – Oberon/Theseus is punished, ridiculed, humiliated, by falling in love with Bottom, another man! How we laugh and jeer! Male-on-male love! What a ridiculous absurdity! And everyone did laugh. But I’ve rarely felt so uneasy since we were all invited to laugh at the effeminate Larry Grayson and at John Inman’s sexuality forty years ago. The abrupt plunge from Shakespearian sophistication to 1970’s sit-com was quite staggering.
Were we laughing at the absurdity of a man falling in love with a donkey, rather that the absurdity of a man falling in love with another man? I don’t think so, because – curiously and surely significantly – the physical transformation of Bottom in this production is extremely light and unusually minimal (nothing more than a big pair of ears) – he is still overwhelmingly a man, not an animal. Besides, the transformation of Bottom into an ass is always supposed to be a transformation into something extremely and coarsely and bestially masculine (the phrase “hung like a donkey” would have been understood by the Elizabethans) – sending this ultra-virile monster into Titania’s bed is Oberon’s way of punishing her for keeping him out of it.
There’s something of The Bacchae’s punishment of Pentheus in Hytner’s punishment of Theseus/Oberon; but, unlike in the Euripides, there’s no suggestion here that it’s a liberation, a release of natural but repressed desires; when the enchantment is lifted, and normality and reality are restored, Theseus/Oberon’s gay phase is revealed to him as an absurd, disgusting and passing aberration – he is ‘cured’ of the ‘curse’ of homosexuality. “How came these things to pass? / O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!” Last week the German government announced its intention to ban ‘conversion therapies’ which are aimed at supposedly ‘curing’ homosexuality – health minister Jens Spahn said “Homosexuality is not an illness and therefore there is no need for therapy” – but the news clearly hasn’t reached Hytner’s Athenian wood yet.
What purpose does this punishment and humiliation serve? Does it humanise Theseus? No – the next time we see him, he is still the same black-leather-clad, rifle-toting bully, even more so. And yet, in the final scene, he has lightened up. Why? How? Has the wedding mellowed him? But the marriage was seen as a patriarchal fascist threat when it was impending. It’s very confusing. By cutting some of his lines and giving others to Hippolyta in this scene, Hytner suggests that Theseus has indeed been tamed somehow (there’s something of The Taming of the Shrew about this; The Taming of the White Male Heterosexual Fascist Bastard, perhaps?) but it’s not a very convincing turnaround.
This production’s dogmas throw up other incoherencies. It opens with Hippolyta captive in a sterile glass prison, wearing the black and grey of a nun’s habit like a prison uniform, no doubt forced on her. A choir of Theseus’s people – nuns and funereally-suited men – sing dirge-like hymns at her. What is this supposed to mean? That Theseus has repressed her femininity, her sexuality, by forcing a sterile, frigid and unnatural chastity on her? But Hippolyta is an Amazon queen – she is naturally chaste – it is part of her identity – Theseus is a threat to her precisely because he is going to marry her and take away her chastity. He is an enemy of chastity – his abhorrence of it is made explicit in his speech to Hermia. (Incidentally, ten minutes of dull and boring hymns – “Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon”? – is a strange way to open the play; ten minutes is a considerable chunk of the production’s running time – how to cut down three plus hours of Shakespearian source material to fit a modern staging of two and a half hours must be a big headache for any director, so to reduce that further seems an odd thing to do and I couldn’t help lamenting the ten minutes of Shakespeare we must have lost as a result).
Presenting Theseus as a representative of the hated patriarchy is problematic in itself, for two reasons. First, Theseus as written by Shakespeare isn’t anything like a macho bastard; he’s gracious and liberal. This is clear enough from the very first scene, where he tries to act as an intermediary between Egeus and Hermia, and chides Demetrius for his loutish misbehaviour. It’s even clearer in the final scene, where he’s the only one who isn’t rude to the rude mechanicals but defends them from the court’s ridicule.
Second, it’s unnecessary. There’s already a representative of the cruel and hated patriarchy in the play – Hermia’s father Egeus – and he is indeed denied and rejected (by Theseus!) in the end. So the play, as written by Shakespeare, is already a critique and rejection of the patriarchy, even without modern distortions. Such crude and clumsy exaggerations as tarring all white male heterosexual characters with the same brush simply obliterates the subtlety, sophistication and diversity of Shakespeare’s script.
Talking of which – the prince’s advice to the actors in Act III Scene ii of Hamlet is generally taken to be Shakespeare’s own instructions as to how his plays should be performed. The one thing which clearly really pissed William off was comic actors inserting their own lines – add-libbed or otherwise – into his script (“let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them…”); it’s a crude way of getting cheap laughs and it risks deflating the drama. Yet this is precisely what Hytner and his cast do throughout this production. The new lines certainly get laughs, but not so much because of any wit they might have but because their ultra-modishness – contemporary and often banal – clashes so absurdly with their elevated Elizabethan context. Luckily the dead white male Shakespeare is no longer around to shout his objections from the wings.
Nevertheless, this production is bound to be a big hit, and not simply because it’s had rave reviews in more influential organs than Shaw Sheet. It’s superbly acted by all; its design is stunningly beautiful and brilliantly effective; and it is very funny. Perhaps I was the only one who suffered whip-lash from its car-crash of dogmas and distortions. The rest of the audience seemed to love it. But then, eighteenth-century audiences loved King Lear with a happy ending.
