A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Director: Michael Hoffman
Cert. PG

You could go and see the new film version of William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and just enjoy its playfulness and its beauty - beautiful scenery, beautiful poetry beautifully spoken, beautiful soundtrack (how could it fail, using Mascagni's 'Intermezzo' from Cavalleria Rusticana?).

Some commentators on Shakespeare see the play as portraying the need for society and its laws to be continually renewed by the poetic and the spiritual, but this is not the way the Dream is handled here.

The director chose to set the film in Italy in 1900; I suspect this was because he wanted to use bicycles and they certainly are fun. The costumes are also delightful. Parents need to know that the PG certificate is accounted for by some short scenes involving (unnecessarily) the lack of costumes altogether, although hair and leaves provide some scanty protection.

But there are other levels to this extraordinary romp, for those filmgoers who like something for the little grey cells. You come away with a few questions.

First of all, what is Shakespeare saying about love, since that is certainly a major theme? You have Egeus, the tyrannical father, who wants love to be ruled by law; you have Helena who finds that her passionate love for Demetrius will not be met by a like response in him. The ensuing muddle is only resolved by operations at the supernatural level. 'What fools these mortals be!' says Puck in one of his knowing speeches. In many of his plays, Shakespeare suggests that the world we see and hear and touch is but the surface of a vaster unseen world by which the actions of men are affected or overruled. And so it is in 'the dream': love is not at human disposal.

Main character

And here is a second question: who is the main character in this play? The answer from this film would seem to be Bottom, played by Kevin Kline. It is he who makes the longest journey and we see him at the end of the film, even while Puck is speaking the closing lines, reflecting on the discoveries he has made. The group of rustic workmen, who provide much of the humour of the play, are not there merely for comic interlude. In fact, the laughter turns to shocked silence when Flute, as Thisbe, mourns dead Pyramus in lines on love and loss as poignant as any Shakespeare wrote. Bottom and his friends symbolise the earthy, ponderous and slow, in contrast with decorous and confident nobles and the light and quick fairies. Bottom is an ass but he has his moment of transformation when Titania sends him 'Bottom's dream'. When Bottom awakens from his dream is a wonderful moment in the film, and the speech, which invariably in theatre or cinema is met with laughter, is actually an expression of a spiritual awakening, with echoes of Scripture, with which Shakespeare must have been familiar.

A patch'd fool

'I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was - no man can tell what. Methought I was - and methought I had - but man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.'

Bottom is an ass. But if Bottom can be awakened, redeemed, there is hope for all.

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A patch'd fool

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