Wizard of Anti-Magic

By Christopher Porterfield

Once, the theater could begin as magic; magic at the sacred festival or magic as the footlights came up. Today . . . we must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.

--Peter Brook The Empty Space

Beware the magician who disclaims his own conjury. English Director Peter Brook may have none of the conventional stage illusions up his sleeve, but in such innovative productions as Marat/Sade and Seneca's Oedipus he showed himself to be a theatrical wizard nonetheless. Now, at Stratford, England, he has proved it again, with a daring and dazzling new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In Dream, Brook's way of opening his "empty hands" is to sweep aside the romantic-ballet trappings that have clung to the play over the centuries. Instead of all those bosky dells and gossamer-winged sprites, his staging presents an explosive, gaudy circus--an ideal format for reminding the playgoer that the performance he is watching is only that: a performance. Yet in Brook's hands such antimagic ends by casting a far more potent spell than most traditional productions manage to invoke.

Trees of Wire. Sally Jacobs' set is three white gymnasium walls, topped by a gallery from which idle members of the cast gaze down on the action. The performers, garbed in shiny capes and pantaloons, clamber up and down ladders, running and tumbling through props like "trees" of coiled steel wire suspended from fishing poles. Puck and Oberon sway from trapezes, and the "flower" they pass back and forth is a dish spinning on the end of a juggler's stick. A battery of percussion instruments rattles and whispers a steady obbligato, highlighted at times by the unexpected singing of Shakespeare's lines to the accompaniment of a pop guitar.

What redeems all this from gimmickry is that even Brook's most spectacular strokes tend to enhance rather than obscure the poetry. Titania's passionate scene with Bottom--crowned with acrobatics, a blizzard of confetti and the blaring of Mendelssohn's wedding march--is not only howlingly funny but also touching and genuinely sexy. By not ridiculing Titania or patronizing Bottom, Brook deftly amplifies one of Shakespeare's themes: the harsh comedy of human shortcomings is only bearable when tempered by tenderness and generosity of spirit. Similarly, Brook's use of some actors in double roles--Theseus/Oberon, for example, or Egeus/Peter Quince--stresses the point that the play's three worlds of court, forest and workshop (or intellect, spirit and flesh) are all interwoven and interdependent. Puck's proclamation of togetherness in his epilogue sums it up: "All is mended."

Dream is ultimately a play about the imagination. It celebrates the imagination's power to heal man's "fierce vexation" in a dream--a dream that is not an escapist fantasy but a vision of order and regeneration. Significantly, Brook underlines the following exchange after Hippolyta scorns the play within a play by Peter Quince's friends as silly stuff:

Theseus: The best in this kind are but shadows--and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

Hippolyta: It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs.

Whose imagination? Not only Theseus', not only Shakespeare's, not only Brook's and the Royal Shakespeare Company's, but ours.

sbChristopher Porterfield

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