Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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 The producer of the film from Sands Studios, Olivier Stockman, gives a fascinating account in which he says, for example, “I can’t remember anything more moving, for me as a producer, than Oberon crying because he’s 10 and he has a problem with his lines. It was so touching because he meant to do it, he was really upset because he had mixed up some lines and wanted to do it again. The depth of genuine desire to do it, the lack of any cynicism about it, was so touching and heart-breaking.”31 He also described learning something about children.
Children don’t act. Acting is a grown-up thing. Acting requires experience, self-knowledge, self-awareness, all manner of tricks and skills, “turnings and windings.” But children play. They play at being someone else, a character. And that requires honesty, great earnestness and intense faith. It requires believing in what you are playing totally. An actor who ceases to believe in the character he portrays can get by through habit and devices. A child who ceases to believe in what he or she plays just stops. The thing ceases to exist. The child who plays, sees, hears, feels the character and the action. The actor sees, hears, feels himself in the character, engaged in the action. Actors have skill, technique; actors are artists. Children who play are rough and clumsy, awkward. Actors embellish. Children who play speak plain and rush to the point. Actors take themselves seriously. The children take the play seriously. And we should take the children seriously. For here, the play comes first. And what a play!
And that defines well enough what is so unsatisfactory about this film. That concluding play on the word play is as clumsy as he says the children are (and it does not work in languages other than English). Watching children play can be fun, the more so perhaps if they are one’s own. But after a while, quite a short while, one begins to wish they could act. They try hard and enjoy themselves, but that is not enough.
THE JARMAN TEMPEST
In a 1987 Institute of Cultural Arts interview with Simon Field,32 Derek Jarman said that he was fascinated by magic as a way to identify a suppressed or subterranean tendency, and thus for him, as earlier for Lindsay Kemp, it was the obvious way to represent the homosexuality that he takes to be clearly evident in much Renaissance drama, particularly in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, of which Jarman produced a widely praised film, and The Tempest. Prior to starting on his film of The Tempest (1979), he made a study of John Dee, who is a constant point of reference for commentators on Prospero. Stimulated by the pioneering work of Frances Yates, both Frank Kermode in his Arden edition and Stephen Orgel in his Oxford edition made much of the connections to Dee,33 but Jarman added the link with homosexuality. The relation between Prospero and Ariel, with its evident sexual undertones, is central to the film, and Ariel’s subservience to the magus may be seen as an allegory of the political repression Jarman knew to be the way the state system worked in the early modern period. Ariel is Prospero’s spy and brings back to his master the information Prospero needs to keep his power.34
In the film Jarman uses several magic tricks.35 He might have actually seen the 1908 silent film discussed at the beginning of this chapter, since his characters emerge from the sea in the same way, though against a blue