A Midsummer Night’s Dream (review)

More than forty years after collaborating on stage and film versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Hall and Judi Dench reprised their respective roles of director and actress at the new Rose Theatre in Kingston. This Dream reunion was much anticipated by critics, who fitfully speculated before opening night about the ifs and hows of Hall and Dench adapting their past 60s-era productions. The Rose’s 2010 Dream, however, strikingly foreswore the mud-slinging and Kott-inspired dark sexuality of the past. Instead, Dame Judy’s celebrity shaped and drove many facets of the show, elevating Titania and her opposite Oberon even as it contributed to a notable diminishing of Hippolyta and Puck.

Dench’s star was made to shine long before the opening lines of the show were uttered. This Dream was keen to draw a parallel between Dench’s Titania and Queen Elizabeth I near the end of her reign—a desire made obvious by the show’s program, the first ten pages of which featured numerous pictures of and articles about Elizabeth I, as well as pictures of Dench in Elizabethan dress. Hall launched this Dench-as-Elizabeth theme in the show itself through the addition of a silent prologue in which Dench as the Virgin Queen progressed across the stage before the production’s awestruck Elizabethan actors. With this, the new Rose Dream itself became a play within a play (within a play), a fantastic masque in which England’s iconic female monarch would be shown acting out her own late-reign fantasies. Equally awestruck was the audience, it being obvious amidst their tangible gasps that, as a twenty-first-century cultural icon, Dench is not so far removed from the sixteenth century’s cult of Elizabeth. Thus, this Dream began amidst celebrity pandering and provocative mirroring. With a smile and one royal wave of her hand, Dench/Elizabeth signified the end of the prologue and ushered in the beginning of act one.

The opening act offered further evidence of the influence of Dench’s star-power. Absent from the production was the now-standard doubling of Hippolyta and Titania, and with it the rich parallel between each queen’s gender-based power struggles. This decision seemed equally the consequence of Hall’s particular take on Theseus—“the centre of humanity and wisdom of the play” (“Director’s Note”)—and Dench’s celebrity. This production, in other words, showed little interest in staging competing Greek and Amazonian authorities: Hall clearly wanted his Theseus to partake fully of the night’s “noble respect.” Audience members, then, looking to Salmon’s Hippolyta for resistance to her recent conquering and her enforced nuptials would have left the Rose thoroughly disappointed. This was a Hippolyta of silence and loving good cheer, an Amazonian Queen more comfortable basking in the glow of Theseus’s wise authority than offering any real alternative to his rational commands and edicts.

When Dench did reemerge in 2.1, her queen offered a sharp contrast to Salmon’s Hippolyta. Fiery and enthusiastic, Dench’s Titania commanded the attention of those around her, and her presence demanded and was well matched by the vitality of Edwards’s Oberon. In the heated opening exchange between the two, one could almost imagine the look and tenor of Essex’s final exchanges with Elizabeth in the months before his execution. As a necessary counter to Dench’s irrepressible star power and well-honed verse delivery, Edwards’ Oberon moved with confidence, spoke with the power of a thirty-something matinee idol...