Free A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

the whole production led reviewers to question what had been described as the RSC’s salute to the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. “If so,” wrote Benedict Nightingale in the
New Statesman
,
    it’s an ambiguous one, with something akin to two fingers sprouting from the patriotically outstretched arm … the doubling of real and fairy king and queen, with the suggestion that Oberon’s revenge on Titania reflects and resolves Theseus’s subconscious hostilities toward Hippolyta, his bride-to-be. In other words, Chuck might feel better about Di if he imagined her having sex with a prole with a donkey’s head. 39
    In Gregory Doran’s entertaining 2005 production, the mortal world was “a chilly, soulless place, with a suggestion of the totalitarian state about it.” 40 More nightmarish and unforgiving than the fairy world, Theseus’ military uniform made him resemble “a fascistleader.” 41 With a death threat hanging over her head, Hermia’s escape into the forest with Lysander takes her from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Jonathan Slinger’s refreshingly lugubrious and mischievous Robin plays with the lovers as if they are puppets for his amusement. In the hands of this curmudgeonly skeptic, who has no qualms about his treatment of mortals, one would fear for their fate if he were not tempered by his master, Oberon, who feels for the lovers’ plight.
    The
Spectator’s
reviewer, Patrick Carnegy, remarked that
    The fairy band is a motley crew of ragamuffins who have one important accomplishment—their magic is that of puppeteers … Doran gives us the changeling boy as an exquisitely animated puppet … Bottom’s attendants materialise as a macabre collection of doll-puppets manipulated by their fairy alter egos … whenever Mustardseed opens his mouth to speak, his head pops up and away off his body. 42
    The themes of manipulation and entrapment in the forest scenes culminated when Robin led the lovers “Up and down, up and down.” Working together, the fairies physically manipulated the lovers’ movements like their “doll-puppets,” holding onto their limbs and guiding them to the appointed place for Robin to send them to sleep.
    Nightmares, as other dreams, offer the possibility for self-exploration and understanding. The lovers, Titania, and Bottom all learn through a period of transformation, akin to a waking dream, that the exploration of the worst parts of themselves can free them from nightmare. Scholar Stanley Wells commented in the program note that
    As the lovers go off to marriage, we are likely to feel that they have been through a necessary but profoundly disturbing experience, and that now they are safely on the other side of it. The experience has grown “to something of great constancy,” enriching their lives just as Bottom’s “rare vision” enriches his. They bring back into the ordinary world something that theylearned in the world of imagination. The illusory has its part in the total experience of reality. 43
    In avoiding the baggage of treating the
Dream
as a light fairy-piece for children, many directors have chosen to focus on the darker elements of the play, with varying success. The difficulty for them arises in trying to strike a balance between the comedy and the darkness.
Everything Seems Double
    The doubling of the fairy and mortal characters in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
may appear now as the normal directorial choice. However, this development in staging has only been prevalent in the last fifty years. Through this device directors have explored the relationship between the mortals and the fairies in terms of the conscious and the unconscious.
    In 1970 this was a relatively new innovation which radically altered the reading of the play, and extended the psychological journey of Bottom and the four