A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare Page B

of the stalls and enclosed by a seamless, seemingly doorless, curved wooden wall at the back of the curve. This closed off the proscenium, put pressure on the space, and also acted as a natural loudspeaker, thus enabling the actors to play freely with the whole range of their voices.
    Athens was populated by gray, buttoned-up people in buttoned-up coats, and it snowed. Fur hats and a general air of frigid obedience gave an Eastern European feel to the opening scenes. Even the mechanicals wore identical gray suits, but it was Bottom’s vitality and imagination that produced the first crack in this imposed closed order. He imagines and embodies the heroic gesture of “Hold or cut bow-strings” so vividly that his mimed Robin Hood longbow shoots a real arrow into the curved (Berlinesque) wall. The wall opens and a buttoned-up lady walks out of a door as poppies start to grow from the floor in a riot of red all over the stage. Color has arrived and Bottom runs away. The lady starts picking the poppies and is now being followed by the bowler-hatted, white-gloved Philostrate, who has also “escaped” through the hole in the wall. Philostrate harasses the woman in an increasingly sexual manner until they fight, rip each other’s clothes apart, and reveal themselves to be Robin and Peaseblossom.
    The world of the court now rapidly transforms, costumes morph and reveal highly colored linings. So the world of the fairies bursts out from within the oppressive world of the court, forming two highly charged teams of male and female. Oberon and his men/boys literally burst the floor open with their violent entrances through traps, further smashing the smooth ellipse and trapping Peaseblossom.
    Doran: I suppose the first thing you have to acknowledge about the
Dream
is that there are three or four very distinct strata. I began by being aware that in order to create a fantastical world, I wanted toroot the real world in a very specific and mundane reality. We began with the world of the rude mechanicals. They’ve got very specific jobs; there’s a weaver, a carpenter, a bellows-mender, etc., and they work on Athenian stalls. They live under a very strict authority—if they frighten the ladies with the lion they think they will all be hanged, so it’s not a cozy society. We wanted to make them real people. I think the problem for me in dressing them in Elizabethan or some sort of abstract costume is that you need a point of departure for the abstraction of the fairies, and you can make the mechanicals exotic by putting them in Elizabethan costume. I wanted them to be absolutely recognizable workingmen. I walked up and down Chapel Market in Islington and looked at the market stalls and the kind of people that worked there. It seemed to me that by making the mechanicals very ordinary, real people they would be funnier and the relationships between them more truthful.
    From that point we had to leap off to find out what the world of the court was. In the court you find that the society run by Duke Theseus is again a very dangerous society, in which if girls don’t obey their fathers they might be executed or be forced to join a convent. Whenever I come to direct a Shakespeare play, I try to read it as if for the first time, as if the ink is still wet on the page. You draw from that, without necessarily trying to tie everything up, all the various resonances that you can. Athens felt to me a bit like Greece under the Colonels, so I began to look at that as a reference point—a totalitarian dictatorship.
    You have within that another whole strand with Duke Theseus. Shakespeare is like some great hydra. You manage to find a setting or locale or reality for one bit and then an extra head plops out and says “Well, you’ve forgotten me.” By looking at the Theseus-Hippolyta story and seeing whether it married, we began to see Theseus as a normal, ordinary, upper-class aristocrat who plays out