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SUPERNATURAL COMEDIES

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest

THE BLURB ON the British Film Institute’s DVD collection called Silent Shakespeare, first issued on video in May 1999, makes the uncontroversial claim that in the early years of the twentieth century the film industry sought to elevate its lowbrow status by imitating the theatre. While cinemas decked themselves out like theatres, filmmakers signed up stage stars and turned to the classics. Shakespeare provided the greatest challenge.

The early Shakespeare films do indeed use many devices of theatre: the static camera clearly shows the continuity of proscenium-arch theatre and early cinema, and the actors come on and off and do their piece in front of the camera but without closeup individual shots, reverse action shots, or montage—techniques still to come in the development of film. One result is that some of these films, or parts of them at least, now seem to resemble records of stage performances, and perhaps even aspire to be so, as the blurb suggests. In one important respect, though, the continuity with nineteenth-century theatre styles was broken; some of the films delight in being films and celebrate the new techniques of cinema.

THE EARLY FILMS

At certain points in its history, film has responded in different ways to the supernatural elements in plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. In the nineteenth century these two plays were considered to be the most revealing of Shakespeare’s imagination. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the great German translator, thought Shakespeare’s treatment of the spirit world to be the most obvious sign of his genius.¹ In both plays, for somewhat different reasons, Shakespeare explores various related parallels between magic and theatre: in The Tempest Prospero’s magic power is explicitly theatrical in the masque he conjures up; in Dream the clowns are frightened of the effect of disguise and illusion on the gentle audience of the play they are rehearsing, and part of the fun consists of the contrast of this attitude with the power of illusion they have experienced in the forest; and both plays have an epilogue that asks the audience to notice and respond to the relationship of magic and theatre. These two plays, taken together, show that Shakespeare inherited, and worked within, at least two competing traditions of how to represent magic: one was the hucksterish trickery of early Italian comedy deriving ultimately from classical New Comedy (as, most notably, in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist); the other was the somewhat later convention deriving from Italian pastoral tragicomedy that presented magic as something for the audience to accept as “real.” In the one case the audience knows as much as or more than the gulls who fall for the trickster’s supposed “magic”: in the other the audience is in thrall to the magician and his skill apparently acquired after long study. Shakespeare experimented in his radical way with both forms in the various new dramatic genres he evolved, as, for example, in the fusion of comic intrigue and tragicomic “real” magic in Dream.

Filmmakers have confronted this experimentation with varying degrees of awareness. Early filmmakers who turned these plays into film relished the chance to exploit the new filmic possibilities of illusion, but subsequent filmmakers, as we shall see, have often been more diffident about the supernatural or have a different agenda than simply that early celebration of the new medium in the silent era.

Percy Stow’s splendid 1908 Tempest (from the British Clarendon Film Company), reproduced on the Silent Shakespeare DVD, has several magic scenes.² Many of them do not appear on stage in Shakespeare’s text but are simply part of the background story to a play that, uniquely among Shakespeare’s works, confines the stage action to the last few hours and tells everything else in reminiscence. The film ignores the strict unity of stage time, which binds the play tightly together. Instead it retells the story in chronological order from the arrival on the island of Prospero and Miranda, and thus we see, for example, Prospero letting Ariel out of the cloven pine in which he had been confined by “the foul witch Sycorax.” There could be no clearer demonstration of the difference between stage time and screen time: the film, though telling virtually the whole story of Shakespeare’s play (without the comic subplot and the attempt to kill Alonso), still lasts only some twelve minutes.

Most shots of the magic scenes in the Stow Tempest are those in which Ariel appears. Played by a child actress whose name, like the rest of the cast’s, has been lost, s/he protects Miranda from the lascivious attentions of Caliban and suddenly turns into a monkey in the process. Caliban himself, however, performs no tricks. He is subject to, but not a manifestation of, Prospero’s magic. Like a stage conjurer, Prospero produces birds out of nowhere and creates the storm, in a scene eerily preminiscent of Peter Greenaway, framed not by computer graphics but by rocks and the onstage watchers, Prospero and Ariel. The storm becomes a film within a film, watched through a theatrical proscenium arch. The scene is very much like Méliès-style stage magic and clearly shows his influence. Lightning is suggested by scratches on the celluloid, and a real sea is superimposed. Then comes a sudden switch to Lumière-style filmic realism as Ferdinand staggers ashore alone. But soon Ariel is leading him around, prancing across an open field toward the camera, appearing and disappearing—both to Ferdinand and to us—and clearly delighting in being a filmic spirit and in mystifying Ferdinand. The audience, though, is not mystified, merely enchanted by the pleasure Ariel and the filmmaker obviously take in the trucage. Prospero as director may be behind it all, but his special-effects man is getting out of hand.

If anything, the contrast at the heart of the play between Ariel and Caliban is enhanced by some aspects of the Stow film. Whereas Caliban is an unkempt local with shaggy hair and an apish gait—inspired, as Judith Buchanan suggests, by Beerbohm Tree’s elaborate stage version of three years earlier—squatting to pull up grass and eat it, the child actor playing Ariel relishes the freedom to dance and skip in front of the camera.³ The scene in which Ariel tantalizes Ferdinand by being alternately visible and invisible is cut in with another subjective point of view, Miranda’s, for whom the spirit is not there on-screen and who thus watches Ferdinand idiotically lunging at empty air. Near the end of the film we see Caliban pleading to be taken on board but rudely refused, first by Antonio and then by an imperious Prospero. The final surviving shot shows him from the rear, arms outstretched, left alone on his island. The Silent Shakespeare version of Midsummer Night’s Dream⁴ also mixes stagy acting and Méliès-style tricks. The opening scenes of the court and the mechanicals are merely theatrical melodrama, but when the action moves to the forest, filmed realistically in New York’s Prospect Park near the studios in Flatbush, we are treated to fairies flying in on invisible ropes as in a stage production, and then come the stop-action tricks. Puck especially almost has Méliès as his signature tune. The transformation scene, for example, develops relatively slowly, with no magic during the rehearsal until Puck suddenly appears from nowhere and Bottom is wearing an ass’s head. The trick is the standard Méliès one of stop-action, as is clear if you slow the film and see it shot by shot. Then Titania brings on the fairies, as if onto a stage, but Puck reports to his boss by appearing like Ariel in The Tempest through stop-action camera work. Rapidity of action is indeed the main element in the filmic characterization of Puck, he who can put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and it is all enhanced by the sudden surprises of his appearances and disappearances. Bottom is restored to his normal shape by another magic-filmic intervention, and the lovers are all married off, in an anachronistic gesture toward the Athenian setting, by what looks like a Greek Orthodox priest.

His boss is actually Penelope, mysteriously substituted for Oberon. This presumably satisfied a need to give the company’s other leading actress a role, but it also followed a strong theatrical tradition in the nineteenth century of having female Oberons, beginning with Mme. Vestris at Covent Garden in 1840. Mme. Vestris was a key figure in making the play once more accessible to the London stage, and her innovations lasted well into the era of film.⁵ She had already staged some fairy extravaganzas, and her marriage into the French Vestris family of ballet dancers gave her ideas for presenting the supernatural: dancing en pointe gives an expression of weightlessness appropriate for fairies, at least as they were conceived in the nineteenth century. Her productions also responded to the newly popular delight in wild landscapes notable in both poetry and painting. Her singing ability explains why she chose to play Oberon: she had already appeared in the 1826 production of Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon. She could also bring into the production Felix Mendelssohn’s music, first performed on the London stage in 1833–34 in a revival of an 1816 production of Dream by Frederic Reynolds. Instrumental and vocal music, as well as dancing fairies, became staples of subsequent productions. Special effects were increasingly practical: moonlight reflecting off watery surfaces and then slowly yielding to sunrise as the lovers awaken, returning the world of the play to daytime normality; and fairies waving tiny lamps on the ground and in the air, “till the entire palace seems sparkling with the countless hues of light.”⁶ Puck too was often played by a girl, the most famous and influential being probably the eight-year-old Ellen Terry in Charles Kean’s production of 1856. In the Vitagraph film it was the gamine Gladys Hulette. Having mostly female and lightly tripping fairies adds an extra contrast with the heavily patriarchal Athens, and it is hard to imagine that the studio was not conscious of the same-sex attraction caused by the substitution of Penelope for Oberon.⁷ In their final scene, she and Titania hold onto each other and walk out of frame gazing into each other’s eyes. By the end of the century, however, George Bernard Shaw could fulminate against the casting of an actress as Oberon.⁸ And film would soon make available new techniques for representing the fairies and the transformations.

THE REINHARDT-DIETERLE DREAM

The silent film celebration of the new medium had receded by the time of the 1935 Hollywood extravaganza A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, which not only makes use of some remaining shards of Shakespeare’s words but also includes Eric Korngold’s arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Overture plus incidental music.⁹ Instead this film is, or has become, in the words of Trevor Griffith, “the nearest thing we have to a film of the old spectacular tradition of staging the play”¹⁰—a record of how the nineteenth-century audience loved elaborate stage effects, including flying fairies and magic puffs of smoke or explosions, Mendelssohn’s music, lengthy ballets, and live animals. At one point Puck appears riding “what can only be described as a Shetland unicorn.”¹¹ The film won two Oscars, for best film editing (Ralph Dawson) and best cinematography (Hal Mohr), the latter by popular vote, not as an official nomination. Students laugh in mixed embarrassment and relief when they see the film (because surely no one could expect them to take this seriously: it’s not Shakespeare, after all), and Sir John Gielgud said watching it was akin to having surgery. This may be unfair, given the interest the film has for historians of the genre, but it is understandable and makes the lyrical generosity of some critics (stating, for example, that “the overall effect is exhilarating”) seem a trifle ridiculous.¹² Today’s youths, schooled in the films of Stephen King and Neil Jordan, are unlikely to agree with G. Wilson Knight, who wrote in 1936 of “the nightmarish fearsomeness of the wood and its wild beasts.”¹³

Reinhardt, who had been directing the play in Germany for some thirty years (and followed his countryman Ludwig Tieck’s Potsdam production of 1834 in using the Mendelssohn music), said he thought of it as “a plea for the glorious release to be found in sheer fantasy”—which makes it all the more important that he shared the direction with Dieterle, whose darker view of the play and especially the fairies gives the film its slightly creepy watchability (Reinhardt’s English was apparently still limited, such that he had to communicate via his German colleague). The cheerful cruelty of Mickey Rooney’s celebrated and almost naked Puck may be Dieterle’s design,¹⁴ and although the child often crows a little too loudly and emphatically, it does not take much to imagine yourself into his power, and so helpless with fear. Witness in particular the only moving bits of James Cagney’s unlikely Bottom: when he is first made to see himself as an ass (which removes the point of his joke about the others making an ass of him), he weeps against the tree, and then again, when he is restored to himself, his whole body trembles. This film’s Puck in his first scene emerges slowly from the forest leaves in which he is sleeping and with which he is at some level, the image suggests, identical. He is less threatening perhaps when he imitates the lovers, leads them astray, and puts them to sleep, but without him and his humor those scenes would be unbearable for the dreadful acting: the lovers behave like sulky and spoilt children—except for Olivia de Havilland, who is melodrama incarnate as she wakes from her snake dream (2.2.150) and manages to lose all its suggestive power. The final act is framed by Puck’s mischievous laugh, as he wakes in the forest, first pretends to be frightened, then sees himself in the stream and lets out a peal of laughter, which the soundtrack transforms bizarrely into Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” He then reappears at the end, when the fairies invade the Athenian space, bringing their sparkling screen with them. And his childish cackle echoes and sums up the other slightly hysterical and often unfunny laughter of the film.

This would have been a very different film if Reinhardt had been able to follow his first ideas. Russell Jackson’s research has shown that Reinhardt initially hoped to cast Charlie Chaplin as Bottom, Greta Garbo as Titania, Gary Cooper as Lysander, Clark Gable as Demetrius, Joan Crawford as Helena, Myrna Loy as Hermia, and, best of all, Fred Astaire as Puck. Nonetheless, many established stars agreed to join the fun. An early script draft for the film also included a role for Bottom’s wife, subsequently abandoned by Reinhardt only to be resurrected more than sixty years later by Michael Hoffman’s film of the play in 1999.¹⁵

What links Reinhardt’s film to its silent forebears is mostly the tradition of stage magic. Elaborate sets and sudden irruptions from the wings, chemical flashes of light, and swirling fog had long been part of the stage tradition, as explored by Jack Jorgens and Trevor Griffith. But whereas the films made in the immediate wake of Méliès’s inventions were full of trucage, this film returns for the most part to the staged magic of the nineteenth century. The balletic fairies shimmer distantly through the trees, as they could have done on stage through gauze, but they are shot in soft focus and so gain an extra layer of shimmer. Oberon in particular is shot frequently in medium or close-up through sparkling screens or sheets of glass, and he wears a bizarre set of antlers on his head from which light gauze drapes as if he were trying out for the part of the Green Man but inadvertently walked into a spider’s web. The sudden cuts to more threatening images like the occasional goblins, however, are probably more effective on film than on stage.

The transformation scenes themselves, of course, are done with the latest resources of film—Méliès-style stop-action shots updated by fades—now in the service of Puck’s potent magic. As Puck mimes the features of an ass, Bottom’s head (and only his head—he keeps his clothes on) is transformed before our eyes. And just for a moment there is the suggestion that he is becoming not an ass but a werewolf—an idea that is surely present just beneath the surface of the play and is often activated by the less benign directors, as it was in Adrian Noble’s immensely successful 1994 Stratford production (and 1996 film).¹⁶ Puck suddenly becomes on-screen the hound and the hog he says he is in act 3, scene 1 (lines 103–6), which was already in the play-text an example of realized metaphor and by then could be shown on film. Fortunately, the directors did not go in for too much of this silliness. In Puck’s narration about the Indian Prince, for example, the screen is free of optical effects until Titania appears floating down a shaft of moonlight. In general the film manages to suggest the iridescent unreality of the world the characters enter in the studio-set forest, even if to our contemporary eye the Athens imagined by Hollywood smacks even more of the fantasy grandiose, like Mankiewicz’s Rome for the Brando Julius Caesar, and even more like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, so brilliantly parodied as Xanadu in Citizen Kane.

PETER HALL’S RSC DREAM

Peter Hall’s 1968 Dream, a version of his Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, makes a fine contrast with the Reinhardt film. The balance of nature has been upset by the quarrelling fairies. “It is not a pretty, balletic affair, but erotic, physical, down-to-earth,” as Hall said. Hence his decision to film in a wet out-of-doors Warwickshire autumn.¹⁷ Although he kept all but six lines of the play, the visual impact of the turmoil in the woods “often speak[s] even more powerfully than the text.”¹⁸ Yet this film too has visibly dated. The 1960s miniskirts and long boots of Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren (Helena and Hermia) look quaintly fetching now in the midst of the muddy darkness of the forest. The fairies are flower children, and Judy Dench (Titania) is virtually naked. But the magic is done with taste and firmness of touch. There is no instantly transformed head: rather, Bottom (Paul Rogers, reprising the role from the earliest surviving television adaptation [BBC, 1958]) walks onto the set with his new head, and we see him just as the hempen homespuns do. Titania’s smile becomes menacing as Bottom tries to find his way out of the wood and out of her reach, and she is made to appear suddenly in his path, exactly where he is not expecting her. A daring touch at the time is the way Bottom’s soliloquy is delivered to the camera. Lights accompany the fairies (the flower children) in their night adventures, but they do not flash or sparkle like a kitschy Christmas. Once again, Puck is the primary focus. His appearances, like those of the other fairies, are done by jump cuts and use Méliès-style surimpression: he is usually in close-up, suddenly there with us on the screen, often occupying it entirely with his intelligent and eager face. He is played throughout by the excellent Ian Holm with a convincingly amoral naughtiness, and he has splendid fun with the leaden Demetrius (Michael Jayston) and Lysander (David Warner). At one point he blows forth a cloud of steam that envelops Demetrius, and a cut reveals the two men walking close by but away from each other in the resulting mist. Though the play ends with that marvelous celebration of theatre that is the Pyramus and Thisbe of the rude mechanicals, the film ends by a celebration of itself: it brings together all the Méliès-based techniques in the short but delightful fairy sequence, once again dominated by Puck, who appears first in the closest close-up of all, his face filling the screen and personifying the film. It is a shame that, as Russell Jackson writes, the film was screened only in cinemas and did not reach the video market in the United Kingdom, while in the United States it exists on VHS and DVD but “in a badly degraded print with poor colour and some jumps in continuity that cannot be explained as part of its claim for kinship with the European avant-garde.”¹⁹

THE CORONADO DREAM

Much less widely known is the remarkable 1984 Anglo-Spanish film, based on the performances of the Lindsay Kemp dance company and directed by Celestino Coronado. The film was intended for Spanish television but was given a wider release via the London Film Festival. Very little of Shakespeare’s text makes it onto this screen, but the combination of sinister dance and erotic movement offers a captivating parallel to those magic words. A lot of the tradition of screen magic is reactivated, and the action is framed by Kemp’s Puck asleep and wrapped in a cobweb. The first arrival of Titania (near the beginning of the film) is announced with electronic flashes, as in the television series Star Trek and Dr Who. The voices are also enhanced with an echo chamber, especially for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania that follows. And the voice of the Lion is a rather sudden and disconcerting animal-like roar, enhanced on the soundtrack and probably an in-joke with Snug the joiner’s wish to have the Lion part written, claiming, “for I am slow of study.” “You may do it extempore,” replies Quince (in Shakespeare’s text but not in Coronado’s film), “for it is nothing but roaring” (1.2.61). The actor, I suspect, spoke no English.

Soon Oberon makes electric magic on Titania to begin the transformations. Puck’s flight as he goes to put a girdle round the globe is done by rapid camera movement, not relying on the suspended wires that would have been used for the stage version from which the film was adapted. The white flower, beautifully filmed in close-up on the screen when Puck brings it back, floats above a cloud. Then comes a stagy flash of light, which signals the arrival of the lovers in thunder (but not rain, as in Peter Hall’s much more somber RSC film). The slumbering lovers (by no means sleeping farther off) are infected by the fairies with a kind of spirit light that flashes and rolls over them like the beam from a ray gun. Later Oberon arrives like a threatening Sandman, superimposed on the image of the sleepers. A beautiful and rather frightening owl, symbolizing all this magic night world, is cut in from time to time to fill the screen; at one point it flies gracefully across the darkened scene.

Aesthetically satisfying and often campily funny as is all this renewed magic, we should probably turn elsewhere than to the Méliès tradition for an explanation of its prevalence. Magic can be seen as a way of emphasizing an alternative, buried, and potentially subversive world, often linked explicitly with homosexuality.²⁰ The Lindsay Kemp–Coronado film of the Dream is explicitly gay, and very amusingly so. When the lovers gradually awaken, for example, we note first that Lysander (who, we recall, did not lie farther off) is naked as the blanket falls back to show his chest. Under the effects of Puck’s love juice, he gazes at Demetrius: the two men immediately see each other and are smitten, coming together in a close-up screen kiss. Then the women awake (Helena too has been dosed with that ray-gun juice), and in a rare twist on the story, the naked Hermia chases Helena into the forest—or is it the other way round? Oberon is the source of the story’s magic, of course, and he is beautifully made up in drag, exerting his influence as much by his presence and dancing as by his secret power, all of which help to forge the equation between magic and homosexuality: the credits tell us that he is in fact “the Incredible Orlando,” Jack Birkett, a well-known drag queen.²¹

In addition, the transformation scenes strongly suggest that Bottom is a werewolf or something similar. He becomes a frightful creature of the greenwood, dressed in green weeds and with an enormously long snout—with which he soon begins to roger Titania, who in her drug-induced state is more than willing. A general orgy follows, and the scene is punctuated by close-ups of the hornèd Puck (Kemp himself) sensuously eating an eloquent bunch of grapes.

Not much of Shakespeare’s text gets in here, but for all that, another play is also present on-screen. When Bottom opens the text of the hempen homespuns’ play and reads it, the cover we read says “Romeo and Juliet.” Thus, the relation of these two plays is made even closer. Shakespeare’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is obviously a narrative variant of the Romeo and Juliet story: he was writing them at the same time, and both have powerful drugs and important speeches about madness, passion, poetry, and fairies. Indeed, the two plays are like inversions of each other, alternating the comic and tragic modes.²² Coronado’s change thus adds to the fun for those in the know but is also one of the many (perhaps too many) in-jokes of the film.

OTHER DREAMS

In 1958 a penchant began for having recognized comedians play Bottom. At the Old Vic, Frankie Howerd played the role, and a scene was picked up in the big-screen Associated-British/Pathé travelogue Three Seasons. On June 24, 1964, ITV broadcast what became a much discussed production, with Benny Hill as Bottom, backed up by other comics, Alfie Bass as Flute and Bernard Bresslaw as Snout.²³ Then in 1971 came another BBC version with Ronnie Barker of The Two Ronnies playing Bottom and supported by John Laurie as Peter Quince; Laurie, famous from Dad’s Army (BBC, 1968–77), had appeared in all four of the Laurence Olivier films, beginning with As You Like It in 1937. More recently, Ed Fraiman and Peter Bowker’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, produced in 2005 as part of the BBC’s Shakespeare ReTold series, had stand-up comedian Johnny Vegas as Bottom. None of these versions made very much of the filmic possibilities, given that the focus was on the funnymen.

But the tradition of linking the filming of the play to some kind of cinema magic does show up in Woody Allen’s typically witty 1982 variant, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. The film makes use of bits of the plot of Shakespeare’s play, without fairies or rude mechanicals, and takes off periodically into Woody Allen–style pseudo-serious farce. At the end, when Leopold, the character who began the film as a version of Theseus, about to marry his Hippolyta, has died of a sudden heart attack at the moment of ecstasy (though not with his bride), he reappears as a voice and a green light that moves mysteriously out into the wooded garden around the country house where the film’s action takes place. As the light moves, the voice claims that it has merely passed into a different dimension and confirms that it has suffered the best form of death there is: “These woods are enchanted, filled with the spirits of the lucky men and women of passion who have passed away at the height of lovemaking. Promise me all of you to look for my glowing presence in these woods on starlit evenings under the summer moon for ever.” I do not know whether The Great Gatsby’s green light, one of the most famous symbols in American literature, is part of the fun here, but certainly Woody Allen is playing on the standard Renaissance English pun on die (as orgasm). The watching lovers turn and follow the moving light out of the door, and the last scene of the film is a long shot of the darkened clearing in the woods where a few (white) lights sparkle and dance. The music that accompanies the scene is the inevitable Mendelssohn (as throughout, mixed in with other pieces by the same composer), and the parody of the whole tradition (nineteenth-century stage to Hollywood film) could not be more obvious.

The dispiriting 1999 film directed by Michael Hoffman might have learned a thing or two from the good Woody. It also tries its hand at a bit of cinema magic in the woodland scenes, but the best it can come up with are sparklers borrowed directly from its Reinhardt-Dieterle predecessor and looking like nothing so much as a swarm of Tinker Bells.²⁴ Indeed, such is the level of artistic vulgarity in this film that the director may even have thought that a deliberate allusion to Peter Pan would help his sophomoric audience to locate the special kind of mood he was trying to create for them. Instead the woodland bits, filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà rather than the inviting Tuscany of the opening scenes, look like Woolworth commercials.²⁵ Wrestling in the mud is patently borrowed from Robert Lepage’s 1992 National Theatre production, for which those sitting in the front row of the audience were issued with plastic raincoats.²⁶ The star cast does nothing to redeem the film; the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer (Titania) and Kevin Kline (Bottom in an immaculate white suit, as Hoffman’s filmscript says) merely expose their limitations. I except Rupert Everett’s Oberon and Stanley Tucci’s Puck from this criticism, but even there the campy gay subtext is amusing but works against any sense of a consistent interpretation. The invention of a nagging wife from whom Bottom has strayed is a curious innovation that increases his guilt at his flirtations with Titania. That such a bizarre idea was felt necessary at all confirms our sense of the incompetence of the interpretation. The choices for sound and setting merely make for a tasteless mélange of various styles of operatic music and nineteenth-century Tuscany: the director would surely have done better to stick with Mendelssohn (whose incidental music is used for the opening, and the “Wedding March” later). Woody Allen (himself a fine musician) had the sense not to mangle his Mendelssohn. Hoffman’s patent effort to imitate the special atmosphere of previous films—such as Adrian Noble’s of 1996 (DVD 2001) and Kenneth Branagh’s Tuscany in his delightful Much Ado about Nothing (1993)—shows up how “hopelessly shallow” this film is by comparison.²⁷ The wayward decision to make Bottom into the movie’s hero, “a dandyish and extrovert, though pensive, dreamer” and with a nagging Xanthippe of a wife, is one of the main reasons for the film’s failure.²⁸

Not that the Adrian Noble film (loosely based on a 1994 RSC production) was above an allusion to Peter Pan. The whole film is adapted from stage to celluloid through the device of a dreaming boy (Osheen Jones) who has been reading the Arthur Rackham illustrated play, and the film borrows the Peter Pan device of a quarrelling family world within the house (the boy peers through the keyhole at his parents, Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan, doubling as Theseus and Hippolyta) opposed to a fairy world of flight without. Like Wendy he is close to the fairies throughout the film and often reappears with them, watching. Their world includes the famous inverted umbrellas of the stage production, but now they do not run up and down on wires from the flies but float upward into cinematic ether. The dream device gives license to several magical tricks: Puck (Barry Lynch) blows a bubble that grows on-screen and is seen to contain the image of the Indian boy; the fairy king and queen also appear in bubbles as the boy watches, though we do not see where they blow from; fairies appear framed in the mirror of Bottom’s motorbike (the remarkable and substantial Desmond Barritt), which occupies the entire screen to identify film and magic; as in the Peter Hall version, Titania’s story of the Indian boy’s origin is accompanied by flashback-style illustration; and Puck puts a girdle round the earth in forty minutes like Superman, and at about the same height. Perhaps the cheekiest cinema allusions are to E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). There is no phone, thankfully, but the moon appears as a backdrop to the workmen as they arrive in the forest. Except that, well, there is no forest, any more than there was on the Stratford stage, which was itself the magical “wood near Athens”—“a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal.” The self-referentiality of the stage version (itself alluding reverently to Peter Brook’s 1970 circus-style production) is transferred to the film via the allusions to popular (mostly Hollywood-based) culture. Bottom’s motorbike and Peter Quince’s bicycle are preserved from the stage version to strengthen the E.T. allusion, and when Bottom takes Titania pillion and rides across the face of the moon with the boy watching, he has become the boy in E. T. That was not possible on the stage, of course, but is an amusing touch in the film. Similarly, the boy appears as part of a Méliès-style surimpression collage that accompanies the “happy-end” forecast from the close of act 3 (“Jack shall have his Jill,” and so forth). Indeed, the Méliès tradition so dominates this film that, since there is no pretend outdoors to be a forest, there is little left for the Lumière. Whether in its lover, its madman, or its poet dimension—and even down to the frontally staged curtain call at the end, in which all members of the cast self-consciously shift their gaze upward from watching Boy to us, the cinema audience—Noble shows his affection for what Méliès had made possible.

Christine Edzard’s brave The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (2001) relocates the magic simply to the delight of the eight- to twelve-year-old children in playing all the woodland characters, not only the fairies (as is often done). Puppets play the court roles (with voices animated by Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond, and friends), but all others are children from schools in the Southwark area of London. The film begins with an audience of children watching a marionette version of the play, but soon the children identify with the lovers and take over: as an audience they react with outrage or disbelief to the story, until a small girl stands up to protest in Hermia’s line “I would my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.56). Jacobi, through the puppet he is voicing, is stunned at the violation of the stage by a member of the audience. The proscenium stage curtains close not a moment too soon.

In the next sequence the children are in costume and have taken over the world of the play. At the end of the film the direction of gaze is reversed: now the puppets (as Egeus, Theseus, and Hippolyta) watch the children performing Pyramus and Thisbe. As Michèle Willems says, the children in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene “react like children in a circus or at a Punch and Judy show: they clap after each individual performance; they are duly frightened by Lion; greet with titters and applause the exchange about the chink but lose interest and become restless when mythological references are flaunted (‘Ninny’s tomb’ falls completely flat); finally they show their enthusiasm at Bottom’s dying performance by standing up and shouting ‘die, die, die.’”²⁹ Edzard was determined to show that kids from various backgrounds could enjoy, even inhabit, the Dream world and claim it for themselves.³⁰ The producer of the film from Sands Studios, Olivier Stockman, gives a fascinating account in which he says, for example, “I can’t remember anything more moving, for me as a producer, than Oberon crying because he’s 10 and he has a problem with his lines. It was so touching because he meant to do it, he was really upset because he had mixed up some lines and wanted to do it again. The depth of genuine desire to do it, the lack of any cynicism about it, was so touching and heart-breaking.”³¹ He also described learning something about children.

Children don’t act. Acting is a grown-up thing. Acting requires experience, self-knowledge, self-awareness, all manner of tricks and skills, “turnings and windings.” But children play. They play at being someone else, a character. And that requires honesty, great earnestness and intense faith. It requires believing in what you are playing totally. An actor who ceases to believe in the character he portrays can get by through habit and devices. A child who ceases to believe in what he or she plays just stops. The thing ceases to exist. The child who plays, sees, hears, feels the character and the action. The actor sees, hears, feels himself in the character, engaged in the action. Actors have skill, technique; actors are artists. Children who play are rough and clumsy, awkward. Actors embellish. Children who play speak plain and rush to the point. Actors take themselves seriously. The children take the play seriously. And we should take the children seriously. For here, the play comes first. And what a play!

And that defines well enough what is so unsatisfactory about this film. That concluding play on the word play is as clumsy as he says the children are (and it does not work in languages other than English). Watching children play can be fun, the more so perhaps if they are one’s own. But after a while, quite a short while, one begins to wish they could act. They try hard and enjoy themselves, but that is not enough.

THE JARMAN TEMPEST

In a 1987 Institute of Cultural Arts interview with Simon Field,³² Derek Jarman said that he was fascinated by magic as a way to identify a suppressed or subterranean tendency, and thus for him, as earlier for Lindsay Kemp, it was the obvious way to represent the homosexuality that he takes to be clearly evident in much Renaissance drama, particularly in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, of which Jarman produced a widely praised film, and The Tempest. Prior to starting on his film of The Tempest (1979), he made a study of John Dee, who is a constant point of reference for commentators on Prospero. Stimulated by the pioneering work of Frances Yates, both Frank Kermode in his Arden edition and Stephen Orgel in his Oxford edition made much of the connections to Dee,³³ but Jarman added the link with homosexuality. The relation between Prospero and Ariel, with its evident sexual undertones, is central to the film, and Ariel’s subservience to the magus may be seen as an allegory of the political repression Jarman knew to be the way the state system worked in the early modern period. Ariel is Prospero’s spy and brings back to his master the information Prospero needs to keep his power.³⁴

In the film Jarman uses several magic tricks.³⁵ He might have actually seen the 1908 silent film discussed at the beginning of this chapter, since his characters emerge from the sea in the same way, though against a blue rather than a black-and-white background, echoing the realistic Lumière mode. But when Prospero (Heathcote Williams) tells Miranda (Toyah Wilcox) her history, though he begins by simply talking to her on-screen, in intimate dialogue, suddenly, when he wants to show her how she was when they were all still in Milan, he brings out a mirror with a long pole attached, eerily like a selfie-stick (though they were some years in the future). Miranda looks into it, and immediately the screen is filled with what she sees. It is her past as a child, and we see it as she does.³⁶ It is a brightly colored memory of childhood, but she is present and indeed central to the series of images, so it is not intended as a dream sequence. This is the magic mirror of filmed fairy tale. It is also a mise-en-abyme of the film process, which gets a thorough revision: images from documentaries are mixed with those of the plot. As we move from room to room in the interior of the large house that replaces the play’s island, we are likely to lose our bearings. Visual tableaux are filmed in front of a largely unmoving camera in an echo of the way cinema got started.

Near the end, at the moment when Prospero sends Ariel (Karl Johnson) off to fetch the sleeping crew from the ship, we have a joke about the film magic. Ariel goes to the door, indicating he will do it in a trice, but finds he cannot open the big heavy door. He turns, opens his arms as for a demonstration, and disappears in a Méliès-like stop-camera moment. The next scene is the memorable dance of the sailors (with obvious reference to the homosexual “Hello, sailor” tradition). The film suddenly turns into Derek Jarman’s version of Kiss Me Kate (itself a gay icon), or West Side Story—and so it becomes The Tempest, the Musical. And there follows what has become a famous piece of cinematic camp, Elisabeth Welch leading the sailors’ chorus in “Stormy Weather.”

At the end of the film, while Prospero snoozes in a chair (perhaps it was all just his dream), Ariel briefly sits on Prospero’s “throne,” triumphant finally in the struggle with his master. He then obtains his freedom by sneaking out past the dreaming figure. He tiptoes past, climbs the stair, and vanishes, while on the soundtrack we hear the beating of wings flying off. The scene, as in much of the film, takes place in a grandly furnished interior (Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, dilapidated at the time but since restored) that contrasts markedly with this sudden intrusion of screen magic. Prospero continues to sleep, now in close-up, as “Our revels now are ended” plays on the soundtrack. But does this final speech (moved, as often occurs, from the conclusion of the masque to the end of the play) confirm Prospero’s lingering control over the magic or return it to the film director? In any case, the main message continues to be the closet relation of gay sexuality and magic, since Ariel is signaled very clearly to the audience as an attractive young male, mischievous, even giggly. He delights in being able to creep away unnoticed by authority and finally to use his own magic abilities, no longer in the service of Prospero.

THE TAYMOR TEMPEST

Julie Taymor’s wild The Tempest has gone as far as one could wish into the possibilities of doing Shakespearean magic on film.³⁷ Released in the summer of 2010, it became the centerpiece of the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Helen Mirren apparently had little trouble convincing Taymor that the magician could be played by a woman. A few interpolations in the backstory explain that Prospera’s exile with her daughter was forced upon her through accusations of witchcraft arising from her intense study of alchemy, which enables her “rough magic” on the isle. Her anger at her enemies is maternal, stemming as much from a desire to protect Miranda as from her need for revenge. The result is Prospera. Taymor had done a minimalist stage Tempest in 1986, but a visit to Hawaii convinced her to make a film: in the supplementary material on the DVD she says that the combination of volcanic black and red rock, strikingly visual cliffs, and wild weather made it seem to her “as if some supernatural events had taken place there.” The film opens on a close-up—within a background of land, sea, and sky—of a castle made from black sand. As the shot widens, we see that the building is dissolving in the rain and in fact is a miniature castle held in Miranda’s hand. Thunder and lightning crackle out over the immense sea, and we/she hear the frightened shouting of the crew of the ship that seems to be foundering in the bay below. The scene is brilliantly beautiful, the product of Prospera’s magic, as she soon explains, but also of CGI. Computer-generated images allow these two women, magician and film director, to make rich and densely powerful versions of their illusions.

The purpose of the masque, which is to show “some vanity” of Prospero’s art (4.1.41), can now be gloriously fulfilled: as Antonio Sanna puts it in the online Kinema article, “[S]tar maps are drawn, various geometrical shapes and the symbols of the zodiac signs are continually superimposed over real stars and nebulae in a sort of representation of a cartographer’s reverie.” The masque is, nonetheless, a vain demonstration of Prospera’s power. Ben Whishaw’s Ariel alternately appears from a white dove and an orchid, and as Sanna puts it “is symmetrically duplicated or exponentially replicated”; Whishaw does not simply evoke the spirits but participates in the magic vision him/herself.

Prospero’s long speech telling Miranda of their history always poses a problem on stage, but it can now be done with remarkable visual force. It can even be extended (actually to some thirty minutes) while the girl, plus Caliban and Ferdinand and the spirit who conjures it all into being, Ariel, can watch and enjoy the sequence. Ben Whishaw makes a suitably ethereal and gender-free Ariel who bursts upward as in a fountain into Prospera’s cavern and our delighted presence. His/her shape-changing is cleverly mirrored in watery images that rise up to ride Ariel’s native element, the air, and s/he also bounds magically over the earth. Whereas Shakespeare’s Ariel is under the power of the magician until Prospero chooses to release him, in Taymor’s film s/he is more of a junior companion to Prospera, or at least not exactly a slave. S/He flies and swoops around the Hawaiian island, Lana‘i, carrying out Prospera’s bidding and performing amazing tricks. Perhaps the most spectacular is when s/he becomes a giant black-winged “minister of Fate” to inform the villains of their punishment. By contrast, Caliban—earth to Ariel’s fire in the play—is here simply a rebellious African in Prospera’s service, using his acting skills (Djimon Hounsou) but no magic. The scenes between Ariel and Prospera lead toward an understanding of what human forgiveness requires. Ariel tells Prospera how Alonso and Gonzalo are suffering and suggests that if she could see them, she would become tender toward them. “Dost think so, spirit?” asks Helen Mirren with shocked surprise. “Mine would, master, were I human,” says Whishaw; she replies, “And mine shall.” The faces and voices carry the message delivered near the end: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.18–23).

OTHER TEMPESTS

The “sounds and sweet airs” of Prospero’s island are transformed in Forbidden Planet (1956)—the most expensive sci-fi movie made up to that point—into the haunting beeps, whirs, and occasional screeches of the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron. The enormous space constructed to represent the two-hundred-centuries-old Krell laboratories are still impressive, as we look down on tiny people moving along immense concrete walkways. The special effects indeed were nominated for an Oscar, but the blaster guns and the way they zap against electronic screens now merely look primitive. Far from expanding the possibilities for Shakespearean magic, the technology replaces it. The captive spirit Ariel becomes the remarkable robot called Robbie, an electronic Jeeves who can replicate the cook’s bourbon once he has poured a good swig through the little door into his innards, who informs the visiting spaceship crew that if they do not understand English he can offer 187 alternative languages, and who does all the cooking (“a housewife’s dream”). He conforms exactly to the robot stereotype—indeed, he probably had a lot to do with starting it off, in that he twice goes into electrically overcharged fizzing and flashing when he is given a command that contradicts his programming not to harm humans.