Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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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 films, beginning with As You Like It in 1937. More recently, Ed Fraiman and Peter Bowker’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, 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