Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

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СКАЧАТЬ by then could be shown on film. Fortunately, the directors did not go in for too much of this silliness. In Puck’s narration about the Indian Prince, for example, the screen is free of optical effects until Titania appears floating down a shaft of moonlight. In general the film manages to suggest the iridescent unreality of the world the characters enter in the studio-set forest, even if to our contemporary eye the Athens imagined by Hollywood smacks even more of the fantasy grandiose, like Mankiewicz’s Rome for the Brando Julius Caesar, and even more like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, so brilliantly parodied as Xanadu in Citizen Kane.

      PETER HALL’S RSC DREAM

      Peter Hall’s 1968 Dream, a version of his Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, makes a fine contrast with the Reinhardt film. The balance of nature has been upset by the quarrelling fairies. “It is not a pretty, balletic affair, but erotic, physical, down-to-earth,” as Hall said. Hence his decision to film in a wet out-of-doors Warwickshire autumn.¹⁷ Although he kept all but six lines of the play, the visual impact of the turmoil in the woods “often speak[s] even more powerfully than the text.”¹⁸ Yet this film too has visibly dated. The 1960s miniskirts and long boots of Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren (Helena and Hermia) look quaintly fetching now in the midst of the muddy darkness of the forest. The fairies are flower children, and Judy Dench (Titania) is virtually naked. But the magic is done with taste and firmness of touch. There is no instantly transformed head: rather, Bottom (Paul Rogers, reprising the role from the earliest surviving television adaptation [BBC, 1958]) walks onto the set with his new head, and we see him just as the hempen homespuns do. Titania’s smile becomes menacing as Bottom tries to find his way out of the wood and out of her reach, and she is made to appear suddenly in his path, exactly where he is not expecting her. A daring touch at the time is the way Bottom’s soliloquy is delivered to the camera. Lights accompany the fairies (the flower children) in their night adventures, but they do not flash or sparkle like a kitschy Christmas. Once again, Puck is the primary focus. His appearances, like those of the other fairies, are done by jump cuts and use Méliès-style surimpression: he is usually in close-up, suddenly there with us on the screen, often occupying it entirely with his intelligent and eager face. He is played throughout by the excellent Ian Holm with a convincingly amoral naughtiness, and he has splendid fun with the leaden Demetrius (Michael Jayston) and Lysander (David Warner). At one point he blows forth a cloud of steam that envelops Demetrius, and a cut reveals the two men walking close by but away from each other in the resulting mist. Though the play ends with that marvelous celebration of theatre that is the Pyramus and Thisbe of the rude mechanicals, the film ends by a celebration of itself: it brings together all the Méliès-based techniques in the short but delightful fairy sequence, once again dominated by Puck, who appears first in the closest close-up of all, his face filling the screen and personifying the film. It is a shame that, as Russell Jackson writes, the film was screened only in cinemas and did not reach the video market in the United Kingdom, while in the United States it exists on VHS and DVD but “in a badly degraded print with poor colour and some jumps in continuity that cannot be explained as part of its claim for kinship with the European avant-garde.”¹⁹

      THE CORONADO DREAM

      Much less widely known is the remarkable 1984 Anglo-Spanish film, based on the performances of the Lindsay Kemp dance company and directed by Celestino Coronado. The film was intended for Spanish television but was given a wider release via the London Film Festival. Very little of Shakespeare’s text makes it onto this screen, but the combination of sinister dance and erotic movement offers a captivating parallel to those magic words. A lot of the tradition of screen magic is reactivated, and the action is framed by Kemp’s Puck asleep and wrapped in a cobweb. The first arrival of Titania (near the beginning of the film) is announced with electronic flashes, as in the television series Star Trek and Dr Who. The voices are also enhanced with an echo chamber, especially for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania that follows. And the voice of the Lion is a rather sudden and disconcerting animal-like roar, enhanced on the soundtrack and probably an in-joke with Snug the joiner’s wish to have the Lion part written, claiming, “for I am slow of study.” “You may do it extempore,” replies Quince (in Shakespeare’s text but not in Coronado’s film), “for it is nothing but roaring” (1.2.61). The actor, I suspect, spoke no English.

      Soon Oberon makes electric magic on Titania to begin the transformations. Puck’s flight as he goes to put a girdle round the globe is done by rapid camera movement, not relying on the suspended wires that would have been used for the stage version from which the film was adapted. The white flower, beautifully filmed in close-up on the screen when Puck brings it back, floats above a cloud. Then comes a stagy flash of light, which signals the arrival of the lovers in thunder (but not rain, as in Peter Hall’s much more somber RSC film). The slumbering lovers (by no means sleeping farther off) are infected by the fairies with a kind of spirit light that flashes and rolls over them like the beam from a ray gun. Later Oberon arrives like a threatening Sandman, superimposed on the image of the sleepers. A beautiful and rather frightening owl, symbolizing all this magic night world, is cut in from time to time to fill the screen; at one point it flies gracefully across the darkened scene.

      Aesthetically satisfying and often campily funny as is all this renewed magic, we should probably turn elsewhere than to the Méliès tradition for an explanation of its prevalence. Magic can be seen as a way of emphasizing an alternative, buried, and potentially subversive world, often linked explicitly with homosexuality.²⁰ The Lindsay Kemp–Coronado film of the Dream is explicitly gay, and very amusingly so. When the lovers gradually awaken, for example, we note first that Lysander (who, we recall, did not lie farther off) is naked as the blanket falls back to show his chest. Under the effects of Puck’s love juice, he gazes at Demetrius: the two men immediately see each other and are smitten, coming together in a close-up screen kiss. Then the women awake (Helena too has been dosed with that ray-gun juice), and in a rare twist on the story, the naked Hermia chases Helena into the forest—or is it the other way round? Oberon is the source of the story’s magic, of course, and he is beautifully made up in drag, exerting his influence as much by his presence and dancing as by his secret power, all of which help to forge the equation between magic and homosexuality: the credits tell us that he is in fact “the Incredible Orlando,” Jack Birkett, a well-known drag queen.²¹

      In addition, the transformation scenes strongly suggest that Bottom is a werewolf or something similar. He becomes a frightful creature of the greenwood, dressed in green weeds and with an enormously long snout—with which he soon begins to roger Titania, who in her drug-induced state is more than willing. A general orgy follows, and the scene is punctuated by close-ups of the hornèd Puck (Kemp himself) sensuously eating an eloquent bunch of grapes.

      Not much of Shakespeare’s text gets in here, but for all that, another play is also present on-screen. When Bottom opens the text of the hempen homespuns’ play and reads it, the cover we read says “Romeo and Juliet.” Thus, the relation of these two plays is made even closer. Shakespeare’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is obviously a narrative variant of the Romeo and Juliet story: he was writing them at the same time, and both have powerful drugs and important speeches about madness, passion, poetry, and fairies. Indeed, the two plays are like inversions of each other, alternating the comic and tragic modes.²² Coronado’s change thus adds to the fun for those in the know but is also one of the many (perhaps too many) in-jokes of the film.

      OTHER DREAMS

      In 1958 a penchant began for having recognized comedians play Bottom. At the Old Vic, Frankie Howerd played the role, and a scene was picked up in the big-screen Associated-British/Pathé travelogue Three Seasons. On June 24, 1964, ITV broadcast what became a much discussed production, with Benny Hill as Bottom, backed up by other comics, Alfie Bass as Flute and Bernard Bresslaw as Snout.²³ Then in 1971 came another BBC version with Ronnie Barker of The Two Ronnies playing Bottom and supported by John Laurie as Peter Quince; Laurie, famous from Dad’s Army (BBC, 1968–77), had appeared in all four of the Laurence Olivier СКАЧАТЬ