The Bard of Avon : Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon

AMidwinter Nightmare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at RST was the worst A Midsummer Night’s Dream I have ever seen. The only reason I did not walk away during the interval was if I leave the theatre, I could not say how bad it was. I think that the director, Richard Jones, successfully destroyed Shakespeare’s masterpiece and made it into a vulgar and a disgraceful nightmare.

I still wonder how Mr. Jones destroyed the play. Everything on the stage was black and white and the forest is completely black with huge disgusting flies. I could see his concept that the dream is a nightmare and the forest is a dangerous and gloomy place. However, I think that his ideas were cheap and not innovative at all. For instance, events in the wood happens during the night in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But, why everything in the forest has to be disgusting and horrified? In Shakespeare's text, the forest is somewhere dangerous and mysterious where extraordinary things happen. The forest is fairy's world where Oberon, Titania and other fairies are. However, it is not the world of horror movies. Mysterious and horrific are very different. It seems to me that the director and the designer do not to understand the differences. I can give another clear example how the director's idea is cheap and tasteless. Helena and Hermia are ladies. They are not prostitutes. Why they have to become almost naked and they do not find it embarrassing? Nudity in a play is sometimes very affective but I could not find any reason why lovers wore less and less clothes. The disarray of clothes are understandable. Yet, why they have to become almost naked? I think that it was just a cheap and tasteless idea.

I wonder whether Richard Jones have read the text closely or not. If he have read the text closely, he would not have come up with those cheap tasteless ideas and moreover, it would have been difficult to destroy the play completely. I think that sometimes the RSC spends so much money and produces terrible productions. If they want to the sets as simple and allows to the audience to use our imagination, why not using the bare stage? Peter Brook famously says in the opening of his Empty Space, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an actor of theatre to be engaged." In this production, the RSC is spending huge money on abstract settings for nothing but interfering the audience’s imaginations. The best A Midsummer Night’s Dream which I have ever seen is the production which has no sets and performed in a garden. Audience members do not need huge mechanical sets to enjoy the production, as Theseus says in the play, "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst / are no worse, if imagination amend them" (5.1.205-6). Nevertheless, as for this production, even I tried to amend them, it was quite difficult for me to amend them because of the bad performance, the bad direction and the dismal design.

It is a great pity that the RSC produced such a bad production. I hope not people who come to Stratford to see RSC productions from overseas and disappointed by this production. I truly hope they would not dislike Shakespeare because of this poor production.