A midsummer night's mystery: my search for Peter Brook's Dream
This article is more than 4 years oldAs a schoolboy, John Wyver was blown away by Brook’s famous RSC production. Then he discovered some filmed fragments. How would they compare with his memories?
We were told by our English teacher at school that we would remember it for the rest of our lives. Almost 50 years on, I can still recall it vividly. The play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was Peter Brook’s groundbreaking staging, which premiered at Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1970 and transferred to London’s West End, where I saw a matinee performance as a 16-year-old. It remains one of the defining postwar productions of Shakespeare in Britain. Brook and his designer Sally Jacobs stripped away the historical traditions of presentation and conjured a production that felt contemporary, illuminating and joyous.
When I came to write a book about screen adaptations of Royal Shakespeare Company productions, one question I was asked time and again was whether a recording exists of Brook’s Dream. The conventional answer is no. Brook said there were many proposals to film it but he always refused, in part because of a fear that celluloid, especially once prints became scratched and dirty, could not adequately represent Jacobs’ white box set. But I have seen three screen versions of Brook’s Dream. Each is partial and imperfect, yet intriguing and invaluable. Moreover, Brook and Jacobs began to plan a feature film version, and Jacobs’ sketches towards a storyboard remain as material witnesses.
On New Year’s Day 1971, the BBC arts strand Review broadcast a 50-minute profile of Brook, which included elements of the Dream filmed on stage in Stratford. These extracts, totalling just over 13 minutes, have been extensively recycled in documentaries about theatre history. Dismayingly partial as they are, and often obscured by voiceover, they nonetheless memorialise key aspects of the production.
After the London opening, a recording of the production was made with a portable videocamera. That tape is now held in the RSC archives at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Seemingly shot by a fixed camera from the front row of the circle, the distanced, foreshortened image, which rolls and flickers, is composed in tones of grey. Figures are distinguishable, and with cues from the audio are for the most part identifiable, but faces cannot be made out with any clarity. Sequences of the audio are involving, but there is little sense that the tape makes for a satisfying viewing experience.
During the 1971 London run, discussions about a possible film led to Jacobs commissioning a videotape record, which may or may not be the tape at the Birthplace. “As I was at the time living in Los Angeles,” she told me recently, “I thought I could be thinking about how to adapt it for the camera frame of cinema.” Preserved now in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, her surviving documents consist of 16 pages of monochrome sketches and notes, together with six sheets of drawings in vivid colour. “Before I had the chance to show [these drawings to] Peter,” Jacobs recollected, “I got news that there had been a change of plan, and that there was to be a world tour instead of the film.”
“My [plan] was to reimagine it completely as a piece of cinema,” Jacobs said on seeing the sketches recently. The pages reveal ideas for transforming the three-dimensional space of the stage to the two-dimensional plane of the screen. The drawing for Theseus’s opening speech to Hippolyta has the lovers as close-up profiles on either side of the frame with a candle flickering between them; Puck’s first appearance is envisaged as a descent from a black void into bright whiteness. Nestled in an archival folder, these simple, beautiful sketches remain as further tantalising traces of this Dream. And there is yet one more screen version to consider.
An invitation in 1972 for the production to play in Japan was received enthusiastically by the RSC, but the financing fell short. “As the costs were so high,” Brook has written, “could I agree to it being tele-recorded in performance so that it could be shown all over Japan and contribute to their expenses? If we all agreed, they promised the recording would be destroyed in the presence of the British consul. I discussed this with the cast, who had all been with me in refusing filming. This time it seemed impossible for us to say no.” Presented in Tokyo early the following year, the show was broadcast by the public television service NHK. Brook subsequently received confirmation that the master had been destroyed.
The NHK archive told me they hold no material related to the broadcast. But after I lectured on one occasion about the destruction of the master, an academic from Japan mentioned that a friend owned an off-air recording. Months later, I received a DVD on which was a recording that had presumably been taped with an early U-matic system. Exciting as this discovery is, this too is not the high-resolution screen version we might wish for. The images are in colour and for the most part stable, the audio is clear and supplemented with subtitles in Japanese. The broadcast appears to be have been made with three or four cameras, and the visual style is functional and unadorned. In many of the medium close-ups facial expressions can be appreciated and enjoyed, although in the wide shots, with the white set occupying only the bottom third of the frame beneath the dark galleries above, the figures are ill-defined.
This recording is by far the most complete way we have of experiencing the production today. Watching it on a laptop the image quality is tolerable, although it is far outside the boundaries of the acceptable for projection. The performances are pitched for a large auditorium but there are still moments at which this screen version is powerfully affecting. When Titania and Bottom celebrate their lust, as Mendelssohn’s wedding march crashes in and confetti and streamers rain down, one of the fairies has his raised fist thrust between the weaver’s legs in joyful priapism. I can recall the intensity of this moment as I watched in the Aldwych in the summer of 1971, but it is not simply nostalgia that thrills me once again as I see and hear it replayed.
“The life of a play,” Brook wrote after the destruction of the Japanese master, “begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream.”
Certainly, the afterlife of the production, and its extraordinary influence, may have been enhanced by the awareness that no full recording was thought to exist. This has given every creator, whether on stage or on the page, the licence to imagine it in the form that they wished it to have taken. But as my search has uncovered, traces of Brook’s Dream do exist – and not just in the hearts of those who saw it on stage. Such traces may circulate as a network of fragments and relics, and further shards may yet come to light. This web may be indistinct in parts, elements of it may be fragile, and for something to be made from it requires reconstruction and exegesis. As, of course, does a dream.
This is an edited extract from Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by John Wyver, which is published by Bloomsbury on 27 June.
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