Do3 – A Midsummer Night's Dream

[Mary Chambers]

I didn't hear all of it, but what I did hear I liked. Like aeolium, I listen for the poetry more than anything else, and I dread hearing it badly spoken. I thought this was pretty good in that respect, and the atmosphere seemed right. My main problem was that I know the Britten opera so well that quite often there seemed to be something missing - the music! It's very hard - impossible, really - to hear many of those lines without hearing Britten's settings in my head.

[aeolium]

ff, I'm glad I'm not a lone admirer of this production.

I was following the broadcast with a text and there was not that much cut. The 'slowness' was in part due to the actors giving due attention to the rhythm of the verse, rather than rushing everything together as sometimes happens. Also some of Bottom's speeches were very deliberate. And then we have become used to productions that hurry one scene after another so that a sense of urgent movement is created.

I thought that initially Helena was the weakest of the Athenian nobles, in that she tended to speak lines with heavy emphasis all along the line, but she did improve later on. Oberon could have perhaps had a bit more caprice and anger - remarkably patient with Puck's cock-ups. But the abiding impression was of the beauty of the poetry, and it's certainly reawakened my interest in this play.

[french frank]

The 'slowness' was in part due to the actors giving due attention to the rhythm of the verse, rather than rushing everything together as sometimes happens.

It's quite right that Shakespeare's lines are often gabbled as if to argue that they are (or rather were) 'natural speech' and people do, naturally, talk quickly. Bottom is one of the last characters that you would expect to think and speak quickly - I'd have thought.

As I said, but I'll say it again , I got more of the potential darkness of the play - especially, at the beginning, the fate of Hermia hanging in the balance. It wasn't the light 'tinkly' play, with fairies and grotesques cavorting together, that I'd remembered.

[aeolium]

I got more of the potential darkness of the play - especially, at the beginning, the fate of Hermia hanging in the balance. It wasn't the light 'tinkly' play, with fairies and grotesques cavorting together, that I'd remembered.

I had always thought of it as a somewhat dark play, despite the comic interludes. The changing affections among the lovers are slightly like the plot in Cosi fan Tutte though here brought about by magical rather than human artifice. Though MND seems to end serenely, there is the sense that love will still be as mutable when daylight returns , and of course throughout it's hard to tell dream from reality.

Though I admire Britten's opera (the one I like best), and Mendelssohn's music, I don't in general care for settings of Shakespeare, as (more than for many other poets) the poetry contains so much music in itself. I think writers, including poets, are often unmusical, but not the bard (or Tennyson).

[DracoM]

It just felt very old-fashioned and a bit WI for me. It did not have much drama or excitement. Poetry maybe, BUT this is a stage play with lovers' spats, near tragedy - i.e Egeus AND Theseus clearly bent on pursuing the law and executing the two young men and sending one of the girls to a nunnery......all in dreamy poetry? No. And then colossal mismanagement by an incompetent Fairy in tampering with the human world, and very nearly a sundering of the Faery world as Titania and Oberon strive for power. Did any of that urgency come over? Without that frisson, it is a drifty nothingness.

And, by the way, there was precious nothing 'northern' about Roger Allam's Bottom. And believe me, Bradford it most certainly was not nor anywhere near it!

[french frank]

Sorry you didn't enjoy it, Dracs. But I can equally assure you that Mummerset (=Somerset/West Country) was also not 'anywhere near it' when it came to Bottom's accent (and I am born and bred in the region).

There is so much modern drama which is about excitable, fast moving, high octane emotion that maybe that's what the concept of 'drama' has become. In film and literature it leaves me cold. Maybe it's that failing in me that made MND enjoyable to me, albeit an exercise in concentration in being 2 hours without a break.

[DracoM]

For me "Mummerset" simply means a vaguely generic agricultural accent adopted by the lazy and / or inexpert to indicate sort of 'country'. Doesn't imply specific Somerset, Dorset, Devon or Cornwall, Bristol or wherever in any way.

[aeolium]

But why should it be a specific locally-identifiable accent, country or otherwise? There's nothing in the text to locate the action to a specific area (well, somewhere near Athens ) I think an indefinable accent is quite appropriate for an indefinable location

[Roslynmuse]

Bottom was definitely more Yorkshire than anything else - he reminded me strongly of Timothy West as Bradley Hardacre in the 80s tv programme 'Brass'.