Page 79 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

68 / Shakespeare in the Movies

We Shadows Have Offended
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Royal Shakespeare, 1968; Peter Hall

The sparkle and lightness Trnka discovered in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, then vividly brought to the screen, is nowhere found
in Peter Hall's 1968 film, nor was it meant to be. "It is not a pretty,
balletic affair," Hall later insisted, "but erotic, physical, down to
earth." Having staged the play three times during the past decade,
Hall became fascinated with the controversial theories of Polish
critic Jan Kott. His revisionist notion held that A Midsummer
Night's Dream, properly understood, was not a fairy tale for grown-
ups but a dark, disturbing play which psychosexually investigated
the Id despite being written more than three centuries before Freud.
Though there's some element of truth to that, such thinking can
easily become reductive and banish the beauty and complexity of
the piece when seized on too narrowly.
Though produced for British TV, this version was filmed rather
than videotaped. It also received limited theatrical release, which
brings it within the parameters of this study. Hall was attacked for
extreme use of close-ups but insisted this had been an aesthetic
choice: "Shakespeare had to deal with close-packed theaters, a huge
audience compressed in a small space and stationed all 'round the
actors, really on top of them. He wrote so actors could literally talk
to them, not boom away over their heads. The closeness of the
camera [then] is no embarrassment. It is, in fact, a support. It insists
on thoughtful speech!"
Yet the close-up, however effective on the small screen, soon
grows tiresome during a larger-than-life theatrical projection. Tele-
vision and filmmaking are separate forms; the product of directors
who believe the two are interchangeable appears as naive as those
who, a century ago, wrongly believed that film was an electronic
extension of live theater. Hall's "film" fails to work as theater, tele-
vision, or cinema—or, for that matter, as Shakespeare.
Following Kott's lead, Hall seized on a speech by Titania (often
cut from lush productions owing to apparent incongruity) in which
the queen of the fairies insists this particular summer seems like
winter, with endless rain, constant mist, and much mud. Hall chose
to shoot in Warwickshire during September and early October, pur-
posefully working under the worst weather conditions imaginable.