A Midsummer Night's Dream

source: The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

When you see the full play in all its glory, you will never settle for Cliff's notes or some modern-day bacterization of the play. Too many versions of this play are just venues for popular actors as is "hamlet" and "The Tempest" which includes female leads. Yes, I know this has Helen Mirren at 36 years old, but she fits well and does not stand out as an actor trying to outdo others and Shakespeare himself. Keep in mind that this is a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Time-Life Television Productions, television version so no exotic CGI tricks. It is so packed with the real wording that you will need to watch several times to take it all in. (1h 51min) Even though the play was meant to be seen you will also want to read it. There are overlapping themes of the misadventures of lovers, enthusiastic thespians, and fairies as part of a Midsummer Night's Dream. "So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle gently entwist. The female ivy so enrings the barky fingers of the elm."

I fell a bit sad writing this review,because I actually like A Midsummer Night's Dream very much.The sets don't look the best and much of the comedy is either too much or too little.The biggest dissapointments were Puck and Oberon,but Helena and Titania were very good.Unfortunately,a lot of the cast seems bored.Quite a dissapointment,considering I actually like A Midsummer Night's Dream.5/10

I think reviewers like tonstant have said it all. The main point for me is that Phil Daniels is way too weird and scary. Drugs and flick knives are fine for a weekend in Briton - but Shakespeare's words aren't a bunch of rockers on a Brighton pier to be repeatedly whacked over the head by an East End bike chain. (Imagine an angry Stephen Hawkins after having his computer reprogrammed by Bill Sikes and the volume set on full). Also, hobgoblin's (I guess) do what they do, not in slavish service to a tedious inner psychosis, but simply for the fun of it. But, there are a lot of things in the play which are very good, and for that, well worth watching.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1981/I) (TV), directed by Elijah Moshinsky, is a BBC video production. Between 1978 and 1985, the BBC produced all 37 of Shakespeare's plays for British television. They are now available on DVD. Although Midsummer Night's Dream is sometimes considered just a frivolous minor comic piece, it's actually a sophisticated and thought-provoking play. When it was written, Shakespeare was already a successful playwright, at was almost at the peak of his powers. He had command of his medium to such an extent that he could add two additional plots to the usual high comedy/low comedy convention of his day. We have two sets of star-crossed lovers-- Hermia, who is loved by Lysander and Demetrius, although she only loves Lysander, and Helena, who loves Demetrius, although he loves Hermia. Hermia's father demands that she marry Demetrius. (Her other choices are to be executed or to enter a convent.) That's just one plot. Meanwhile, in a wooded area outside the city, Oberon, the King of the Fairies, and Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, are feuding over a young servant boy. The boy is with Titania, but desired by Oberon for his entourage. When these two fight, nature goes into disarray, and people suffer. Theseus--the mythic hero--is ruler of Athens, where the play is set. He has defeated the Amazons and captured their queen, Hippolyta. He plans to marry Hippolyta in four days, so we know that all other matters must be settled by then. Finally, a group of working-class men ("rude mechanicals") is preparing a play to celebrate the nuptials. The play is Pyramus and Thisbe, which is about two truly star-crossed lovers who die because of their love. (Perhaps not the best choice for a wedding celebration, but that's the play they've chosen.) Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy, so we know that the play won't end with dead actors being carried offstage. However, sorting out and bringing all these plots to fruition required the genius of William Shakespeare. The BBC did an excellent job with this play. Helen Mirren is superb as Titania, the Queen of the Fairies. (It's interesting that 20 years earlier she had played Hermia.) Titania is surrounded by her entourage of fairies, played primarily by children, and you really get the sense that something magical is happening. The fairies don't float in the air like Tinkerbell. They stumble and tumble along in front of, alongside, and behind Titania. I checked the bios of the other principle actors, and they are all solid professionals. However, as far as I could tell, none of them ever attained the stature of Helen Mirren. Nonetheless, they play their parts well and they work well together in ensemble. As I wrote in my review of the BBC's Hamlet, this movie presents us with good, solid Shakespeare. It's a very satisfying production, and definitely worth seeing. The BBC Shakespeare series was particularly popular for use in schools, colleges, and public libraries. Because they were made for TV, they work very well on the small screen. The DVD's are expensive to purchase individually, although the boxed sets are more reasonably priced. My suggestion is to check the DVD out of your local or college library, and treat yourself to over two hours of excellent Shakespeare.

Let me say first of all that this is easily my favourite of all Shakespeare's plays. The way that it interweaves the fantastical and the real is exceptional. But this production did not do it the credit that it deserves. There were a lot of good things here. All Shakespearean productions seem to have at least one actor who doesn't seem at home with the language. It looked for a while as if this one would get away from that. Unfortunately, Puck's entrance kind of spoiled this for me, and as he is a major player it was doubly disappointing. He was totally miscast, and some of his better known lines were almost painful. Having Titania's bed chamber looking like a Rubens painting was a great touch - to say nothing of Titania herself, who, played by Helen Mirren, was outstanding. Making her attendants so numerous and so young was also excellent - in theory. But again, none of them (in their, admittedly few, speaking parts) seemed in any way comfortable with the language. I realise that Shakespeare can't be easy for 10-year-olds, but surely they could have done a little better. The sets were also a disappointment, the forests clearly being indoors and the puddles therein being miraculously free of mud. I don't know what would have been wrong with just shooting that part outdoors. It must be a tough production to get right. There were certainly some good things there, but some unnecessarily bad ones as well. I enjoyed it, but the Hollywood version from 1999 is better, and probably easier to source.

Unsalted, humorless, and without a charm, this is mind-bogglingly the work of professionals from the BBC. Line by line, the actors strangle the life out of one of the bard's most accessible yet most wild and original plays. The lovers aren't in love, the dreamer Bottom has no insides with which to dream, Hippolyta and Theseus are soporific and some of the fairies have cheaply synthesized voices. Believe it. Any time, money or talent captured by this film seems to have gone into production design. A few sources (including reviewers here) mention the production's use of the Old Masters' paintings for tableaux vivants in the scenes. If they had just made a nice, corny little series of staged paintings, instead of trying to glue the paintings on to a Shakespeare play, I wouldn't be wondering, thirty years later, why the director Elijah Moshinsky has such contempt for the art of acting, or even the proper use of glue.

Most of the productions in the BBC's Shakespeare series range from good to excellent, but there are a few duds. This production falls into the latter category. It is perhaps the worst, and certainly one of the worst, in the whole series. The shortcomings arise chiefly from the inept directorial job by Elijah Moshinsky (though Nigel Davenport doesn't help with some painfully bad acting -- or, rather, expressionless reciting in lieu of acting -- in Act I). The four actors who portray the young lovers deliver excellent performances, but their efforts are undermined in Act III.ii by the director's disastrously ill-advised decision to have them speak quite a few of their lines simultaneously. Equally bizarre is the director's tendency to chop up and rearrange portions of the dialogue and to delete other portions. (Contrary to what is stated in two of the other reviews on this site, it is certainly not the case that all the dialogue is included in this production. A few of the deletions are well judged, though most of them are at best pointless.) If a director has so little respect for Shakespeare's art, why would he take on the task of directing this play at all?! The performance by Phil Daniels as Puck is quite good, but it could have been much better if a competent director had reined Daniels in when he became too brisk and shrill in his articulation of his lines. Directorial incompetence is even more woefully evident in Act V. The mechanicals' play within a play is grimly unfunny. Having seen 60-70 productions of "Dream" during the past quarter of a century, I have never come upon a worse rendering of the final Act. Helen Mirren is superb, but Peter McEnery is far too fierce in his portrayal of Oberon. He is clearly an adept actor, but he was let down by the director; a competent director would have reminded him that "Dream" is a comedy and that he ought to be striving for more humor and less ferocity. This production does not altogether obscure the magic of Shakespeare's wonderful play, but it is overall a sore disappointment. ADDENDUM: Having watched this production four more times since writing the review that appears above, I want to add a few comments. First, although I fully stand by my remark about the disastrously ill-judged directing of scene III.ii, I should note that the simultaneous uttering of lines blessedly comes to an end after Lysander and Demetrius exit cheek by jowl. Thereafter, the scene is well presented. Second, although Nigel Davenport does sometimes briefly descend into expressionless recitation in the opening scene of the play, my remark above now strikes me as too harsh. Third, likewise somewhat too harsh is my remark about the final Act. Though I have witnessed far better renderings of the play within the play, this rendering is sometimes mildly amusing. Fourth, I'm inclined to intensify my remark about the deletion of portions of the dialogue. In such a short play, there is no adequate justification for the deletions.

A BBC, Time-Life production from the early 1980s, this TV adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream has all of Shakespeare's words but none of the magic. Trying to ensure that none of the text is left out, the actors deliver their lines at a breakneck pace, almost sounding like the debating team in Rocket Science. Consequently, much of Shakespeare's nuance and poetry is lost. This is a play that relies on myth and allegory to make its point which is essentially that reality is malleable and can be influenced by the spirit world for either good or ill, yet its treatment here is cumbersome and heavy-handed rather than light and playful. The play, replete with allusions to Greek mythology, is about a trio of mixed-up lovers: Hermia, Denetrius, and Lysander. Hermia's overbearing father Egeus is partial to Demetrius, his choice to be Hermia's husband. Indeed, Egeus' description in the play's first scene of his love for Demetrius sounds suspiciously like Shakespeare's entreaties to the fair youth in the Sonnets. In the same vein, Duke Theseus, who is marrying former enemy Hippolyta, sounds the refrain that the duty of a beloved youth is to make a copy of himself to preserve for future generations. Meanwhile Hermia is fixated on Lysander and will not consider anyone else as a husband, although choosing to disobey her father may lead to a potential death sentence or life as a nun which may be the same thing. To escape, Hermia agrees to run off with Lysander into the forest but naively conveys the information to Helena, a young maiden who longs for Demetrius. She follows Demetrius into the forest to try and stop Hermia and Lysander but they come upon a group of fairies who have their own agenda, leading to a romantic farce of mistaken identities caused by the fairies magical potions. One of the subplots concerns a theatrical troupe of workers who offer a play within a play that bring the proceedings to a comic high. The cast is competent but uninspired with the possible exception of Helen Mirren as The Faerie Queen. Nicky Henson as Demetrius and Robert Lindsay as Lysander seem too old for the part of young lovers and speak their lines with a clunky earnestness that is all wrong for the mood. Phil Daniels plays Puck with a demonic grin, belying the characters' playful nature. All in all, work of nimble grace is turned into an often incomprehensible shouting match that makes one long for some of the magic fairies potion - to sleep, perchance to dream.

This is the second time I've seen her in this play, first as Titania. The first time she was in a movie version of the Dream she was Hermia, one of the lovers. This is a good version for a class room viewing. It lacks the nudity and innuendos that Hall's and Hoffman's exhibited. This is also the one I know of where Puck is a punk. I love this version because it doesn't cut out any of the dialogue. It heightens the tension and passion Mirren's character had in the section about the environmental affects her feud with her husband has had. The costumes do not blend well with one another. It makes it hard to date and does not give the story a sense of timelessness. Also, you can get this on video. It's hard to find but it can be located at a library near you. Blockbuster will not carry it for whatever reason. PBS is a good source too but don't hold out for it.