For many millions of people across the world A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been their first encounter with Shakespeare. Its remarkably rich veins of comedy had an inst... more >
For many millions of people across the world A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been their first encounter with Shakespeare. Its remarkably rich veins of comedy had an instant appeal, from Bottom in his asinine transformed state to the hapless lovers with the men under the influence of the love-juice, from the energy of the lovers’ escape from Athens to the broad farce and brilliant stage-business of the workers’ production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. As we grew up the play changed: it became a darker comedy of marital discord and the pain of a lover’s rejection, even a bleak vision of a world of sexual jealousy. That later version of the play is one that has lost something of the magic and joyous fantasy we first encountered and fell for. Then we had no idea that Shakespeare’s language was difficult; now it can seem a massive obstacle. Then we found immediate delight; now our pleasures seem more hard-won. Perhaps the ‘adult’ view of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not necessarily a better or more truthful understanding of the play.
Christine Edzard’s film gives the play back to the children, to a moment when the adult world seems threateningly authoritarian, to that space in our lives when adults can often forget that the private world of children has its own rights and values. Her young performers seem as keen to escape from school as from the harsh Athenian law. Throughout, the film shows their wonderfully willing commitment to a language and a drama that must have seemed at times strange and almost incomprehensible. In this enchanted wood A Midsummer Night’s Dream becomes remade and newly accessible, the play we first knew rather than the one we grew into. As the youthful actors are transformed into characters and as the characters go through their magical experiences, so we, as the film’s audience, can find again the delight in rediscovering the play, learning again that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘charming’ – in so many senses of that overused word.
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