Frolicking with the Bard

By * T.E. Kalem

The Royal Shakespeare Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a dazzling delight from beginning to end and a frolicsome homage to the Bard at which he himself might approvingly twinkle. Acclaimed on its opening in Stratford (TIME, Oct. 19), the production has crossed the Atlantic undiminished in verve and excellence.

The show's director, Peter Brook, is a man of many devices. His chief device is to defeat the traditional expectations of the audience. His credo might be "Accentuate the opposite." This credo links Marat/ Sade with King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Do we expect actors to move naturally on stage and to speak intelligible words? In Marat/ Sade, Brook made his actors move as if walking were a stylized, agonized abstraction of motion. The actors moaned, groaned, hissed and made surrealistic animal noises. Do we think of Lear as an arrogant red-hotheaded old king, his own Fool's fool? Brook gave us the first ice-cold Lear, a man who fully understands that his predicament is to be a puppet meaninglessly strung from a sky without gods.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Brook tactic is amplified. As experienced, the world of a dream is nocturnal and ill-defined. Brook sets his Dream within three sharp, blazingly white gym walls. For trees, Brook gives us heavy metal coils. Bucolic imagery becomes relentlessly urban.

Too Many Tricks? This is not to say that Brook has violated Shakespeare. However, the incessant sportive business of the production--stilt-walking, juggling, confetti and paper-olate throwing --makes one wonder a little about the Brook who has said that in today's theater "we must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves." Is he not now committed to wearing a few too many tricks on his sleeve?

A Midsummer Night's Dream raises one further question. Both Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. the astringently rigorous Polish director to whom Brook is partially indebted, have repeatedly claimed that they want to restore the theater to actors and actresses. Yet the results of this director-actor axis have ironically proved the opposite. Actors under Brook and Grotowski express Brook and Grotowski, rather in the manner of orchestras under the batons of Toscanini or Koussevitzky. Their group efforts are mesmerically disciplined, but their individuality seems submerged.

Perhaps Brook and Grotowski are caretakers of survival for an era in which drama is in abeyance or decline. Their productions are brilliant rockets that momentarily light up a dark creative sky that awaits the suns and moons of great and gifted playwrights.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.