Free A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare Page A

lovers to all the mortals. Brook’s
Dream
depicted the unconscious enactment of unresolved tensions which needed to be explored before the royal couple could come together in happy marriage at the end of the play. The director himself explained:
    The play unfolds like a dream before [Theseus and Hippolyta’s] wedding in which an almost identical couple appear—Oberon and Titania. Yet this other couple are in an opposition so great that, as Titania announces in a language of great strength, it brings about a complete schism in the natural order … Thus on the one hand we have a man and woman in total dispute and, on the other, a man and woman coming together through a concord found out of a discord. The couples are so closely related that we felt that Oberon and Titania could easily be sitting inside the minds of Theseus and Hippolyta. 44
    In Bill Alexander’s 1986 production only Hippolyta and Titania were doubled, while Theseus and Oberon were played by separate actors:
    The key to Mr. Alexander’s interpretation lies in the moment when, as the rude mechanicals come on stage to rehearse, Janet McTeer’s elegant, disdainful Hippolyta passes them on her way off. She and Bottom exchange a long appraising look across a social chasm. What follows is, in effect, Hippolyta’s dream. 45
    This Hippolyta, described as “glacial and contemptuous” 46 in the Athenian scenes, obviously did not relish the prospect of marriage to the boring Theseus. She “has the opportunity to express an inner life—a slinkily clad ice-maiden whose fantasies are realized by transformation into a fairy queen of bewitchingly tender sexual desire.” 47 Her Oberon (Gerard Murphy) became the ideal partner, equal to her in physical strength and passion. The wordless coda at the start of the play also put a different spin on Titania’s relationship with Bottom:
    In the wood, the affection between [Bottom] and [Titania] is played almost completely “straight,” emphasizing both its realness and its impossibility. Love that crosses barriers in the night’s most hopeless “dream,” sprinkling regret over the ubiquitous frolics. 48
    This Bottom was gentler and more sympathetic, a true alternative to the chauvinism of Theseus and Oberon; consequently, he drew from Titania a warm and tender response, which, if it did not entirely eliminate the element of lustful sensuality, de-emphasised it considerably. 49
    At the end of the play, Hippolyta stepped into the fairy ring and—as Titania—sang the blessing with Oberon to the newlyweds, harmonizing the worlds of the play, and emphasizing the connection between reality and dreams.
    In Michael Boyd’s 1999 production, the fairies were played as doppelgängers of the mortals, releasing their inner selves from their daytime personae. According to
Times
critic Benedict Nightingale,
    Theseus and Hippolyta become their subconscious selves, Oberon and Titania. They dream out their conflicts and marry happily. But Boyd takes the approach further … Athens itself sheds its superego and lets its id rampage, until Theseus, Hippolyta, lovers, mechanicals, everyone, are clattering together in a dance that Zorba himself would have found too anarchic. 50
    Aidan McArdle, who doubled as Robin and Philostrate, explains that Act 3 Scene 2, in which Oberon comforts Robin’s fear at the coming dawn, was given an added significance by the whole concept of the production:
    We had it in our heads as we played this … that they were afraid of turning back into their daylight selves. As it gets light Puck must be transformed into that monster Philostrate—and Philostrate is as much a monster for Puck as Puck is for Philostrate. 51
    The opening scenes in the Athenian court contained virtually no color; the characters were wrapped up in large dark overcoats. The fairy world emerged from the mortal world via a simple