Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ produced in 2005 as part of the BBC’s Shakespeare ReTold series, had stand-up comedian Johnny Vegas as Bottom. None of these versions made very much of the filmic possibilities, given that the focus was on the funnymen.

      But the tradition of linking the filming of the play to some kind of cinema magic does show up in Woody Allen’s typically witty 1982 variant, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. The film makes use of bits of the plot of Shakespeare’s play, without fairies or rude mechanicals, and takes off periodically into Woody Allen–style pseudo-serious farce. At the end, when Leopold, the character who began the film as a version of Theseus, about to marry his Hippolyta, has died of a sudden heart attack at the moment of ecstasy (though not with his bride), he reappears as a voice and a green light that moves mysteriously out into the wooded garden around the country house where the film’s action takes place. As the light moves, the voice claims that it has merely passed into a different dimension and confirms that it has suffered the best form of death there is: “These woods are enchanted, filled with the spirits of the lucky men and women of passion who have passed away at the height of lovemaking. Promise me all of you to look for my glowing presence in these woods on starlit evenings under the summer moon for ever.” I do not know whether The Great Gatsby’s green light, one of the most famous symbols in American literature, is part of the fun here, but certainly Woody Allen is playing on the standard Renaissance English pun on die (as orgasm). The watching lovers turn and follow the moving light out of the door, and the last scene of the film is a long shot of the darkened clearing in the woods where a few (white) lights sparkle and dance. The music that accompanies the scene is the inevitable Mendelssohn (as throughout, mixed in with other pieces by the same composer), and the parody of the whole tradition (nineteenth-century stage to Hollywood film) could not be more obvious.

      The dispiriting 1999 film directed by Michael Hoffman might have learned a thing or two from the good Woody. It also tries its hand at a bit of cinema magic in the woodland scenes, but the best it can come up with are sparklers borrowed directly from its Reinhardt-Dieterle predecessor and looking like nothing so much as a swarm of Tinker Bells.²⁴ Indeed, such is the level of artistic vulgarity in this film that the director may even have thought that a deliberate allusion to Peter Pan would help his sophomoric audience to locate the special kind of mood he was trying to create for them. Instead the woodland bits, filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà rather than the inviting Tuscany of the opening scenes, look like Woolworth commercials.²⁵ Wrestling in the mud is patently borrowed from Robert Lepage’s 1992 National Theatre production, for which those sitting in the front row of the audience were issued with plastic raincoats.²⁶ The star cast does nothing to redeem the film; the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer (Titania) and Kevin Kline (Bottom in an immaculate white suit, as Hoffman’s filmscript says) merely expose their limitations. I except Rupert Everett’s Oberon and Stanley Tucci’s Puck from this criticism, but even there the campy gay subtext is amusing but works against any sense of a consistent interpretation. The invention of a nagging wife from whom Bottom has strayed is a curious innovation that increases his guilt at his flirtations with Titania. That such a bizarre idea was felt necessary at all confirms our sense of the incompetence of the interpretation. The choices for sound and setting merely make for a tasteless mélange of various styles of operatic music and nineteenth-century Tuscany: the director would surely have done better to stick with Mendelssohn (whose incidental music is used for the opening, and the “Wedding March” later). Woody Allen (himself a fine musician) had the sense not to mangle his Mendelssohn. Hoffman’s patent effort to imitate the special atmosphere of previous films—such as Adrian Noble’s of 1996 (DVD 2001) and Kenneth Branagh’s Tuscany in his delightful Much Ado about Nothing (1993)—shows up how “hopelessly shallow” this film is by comparison.²⁷ The wayward decision to make Bottom into the movie’s hero, “a dandyish and extrovert, though pensive, dreamer” and with a nagging Xanthippe of a wife, is one of the main reasons for the film’s failure.²⁸

      Not that the Adrian Noble film (loosely based on a 1994 RSC production) was above an allusion to Peter Pan. The whole film is adapted from stage to celluloid through the device of a dreaming boy (Osheen Jones) who has been reading the Arthur Rackham illustrated play, and the film borrows the Peter Pan device of a quarrelling family world within the house (the boy peers through the keyhole at his parents, Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan, doubling as Theseus and Hippolyta) opposed to a fairy world of flight without. Like Wendy he is close to the fairies throughout the film and often reappears with them, watching. Their world includes the famous inverted umbrellas of the stage production, but now they do not run up and down on wires from the flies but float upward into cinematic ether. The dream device gives license to several magical tricks: Puck (Barry Lynch) blows a bubble that grows on-screen and is seen to contain the image of the Indian boy; the fairy king and queen also appear in bubbles as the boy watches, though we do not see where they blow from; fairies appear framed in the mirror of Bottom’s motorbike (the remarkable and substantial Desmond Barritt), which occupies the entire screen to identify film and magic; as in the Peter Hall version, Titania’s story of the Indian boy’s origin is accompanied by flashback-style illustration; and Puck puts a girdle round the earth in forty minutes like Superman, and at about the same height. Perhaps the cheekiest cinema allusions are to E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). There is no phone, thankfully, but the moon appears as a backdrop to the workmen as they arrive in the forest. Except that, well, there is no forest, any more than there was on the Stratford stage, which was itself the magical “wood near Athens”—“a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal.” The self-referentiality of the stage version (itself alluding reverently to Peter Brook’s 1970 circus-style production) is transferred to the film via the allusions to popular (mostly Hollywood-based) culture. Bottom’s motorbike and Peter Quince’s bicycle are preserved from the stage version to strengthen the E.T. allusion, and when Bottom takes Titania pillion and rides across the face of the moon with the boy watching, he has become the boy in E. T. That was not possible on the stage, of course, but is an amusing touch in the film. Similarly, the boy appears as part of a Méliès-style surimpression collage that accompanies the “happy-end” forecast from the close of act 3 (“Jack shall have his Jill,” and so forth). Indeed, the Méliès tradition so dominates this film that, since there is no pretend outdoors to be a forest, there is little left for the Lumière. Whether in its lover, its madman, or its poet dimension—and even down to the frontally staged curtain call at the end, in which all members of the cast self-consciously shift their gaze upward from watching Boy to us, the cinema audience—Noble shows his affection for what Méliès had made possible.

      Christine Edzard’s brave The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001) relocates the magic simply to the delight of the eight- to twelve-year-old children in playing all the woodland characters, not only the fairies (as is often done). Puppets play the court roles (with voices animated by Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond, and friends), but all others are children from schools in the Southwark area of London. The film begins with an audience of children watching a marionette version of the play, but soon the children identify with the lovers and take over: as an audience they react with outrage or disbelief to the story, until a small girl stands up to protest in Hermia’s line “I would my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.56). Jacobi, through the puppet he is voicing, is stunned at the violation of the stage by a member of the audience. The proscenium stage curtains close not a moment too soon.

      In the next sequence the children are in costume and have taken over the world of the play. At the end of the film the direction of gaze is reversed: now the puppets (as Egeus, Theseus, and Hippolyta) watch the children performing Pyramus and Thisbe. As Michèle Willems says, the children in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene “react like children in a circus or at a Punch and Judy show: they clap after each individual performance; they are duly frightened by Lion; greet with titters and applause the exchange about the chink but lose interest and become restless when mythological references are flaunted (‘Ninny’s tomb’ falls completely flat); finally they show their enthusiasm at Bottom’s dying performance by standing up and shouting ‘die, die, die.’”²⁹ Edzard was determined to show that kids from various backgrounds could enjoy, even inhabit, the Dream world and claim it for themselves.³⁰ СКАЧАТЬ