News
REVIEW
OF “A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM”
by Mark Thornton Burnett
This independent film made by Virus
Theatre, and unfolding in the mountains and forests of the Southwest U.S., is a quirky and offbeat but always illuminating film version of Shakespeare’s play. Making full use of outdoor locations – a ruined concrete building and rocky outcrops – the film transforms Shakespeare’s early modern Athenian lovers into squabbling backpackers disoriented by a displacement into unfamiliar natural environs.
Casting is imaginative and, in keeping
with the general conceit, purposefully non-conventional: not only are some
parts switched in terms of gender, others are given an unexpected twist. Bottom
(Sam Bensusen) is a bearded would-be thespian who speaks with an Irish brogue;
Oberon (Dominic Dahl-Bredine) is a dreadlocked and Gothicized type; and Puck
(Becca Anderson) appears as a distinctly earth-bound spirit in glasses and
dungarees. Even if most of the language
of the play is retained with few cuts, which will make the DVD attractive to students and teachers, this
remains a Shakespeare angled towards a radical re-envisioning of the Bard and
revelling in opportunities for change and experiment.
Matching the insouciant approach to
Shakespearean representational tradition, visuals are consistently inventive,
functioning in such a way as to approximate the woozy dream-like experiences of
the ‘original’. Shots of seas and
lightning, cut into the action proper, dovetail with the
dialogue and make available postmodern realizations of Shakespearean language
and allusion. Green-tinged filters offer
reminders of the role of nature in shaping human action, while inserts of
animals,
such as fighting stags, reinforce the
sense of primal erotic conflict. Stylistically,
the film is trick heavy; indeed, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM turns into a
veritable showcase of imported cinematic artifice and graphic expertise.
Colourful compositions show fragments of Shakespeare’s text illuminated on
screen as if in acknowledgement of the reputation of the work that is being
adapted, the effect of which is to place characters’ anxieties and motivations
in another register. The speeding up of
the physical business of the ‘mechanicals’ – hand-held camera work is to the
fore – makes them akin to silent film comedians and grants their
rehearsals a slapstick emphasis, while the superimposition of images gives to
the whole a pronounced self-consciousness.
Indeed, at several points, not least in the mechanicals’ performance,
cameras are glimpsed, which highlights the labour that informs the filmic
product. All is anti-realist and
off-key; the stress is on surprise and provocation and on keeping the spectator
in a heightened sense of critical engagement.
In diegetic terms, it is consistently
centred on placing word and sound together in a productive relation. The film’s soundtrack, a specially composed score by Joseph Rivers, makes a virtue of its polymorphous influences, for
Gaelic strains combine with twangy lullabies in an evocative invocation of
non-western aural effects (helped by the use of the Indian flute) and
Elizabethan-style musical accompaniments (sounds of the viol bring a
Shakespearean world to mind). Notably
successful is the way in which the film deploys music to draw
attention to dialogic specifics; for example, the recreation of an early modern
soundscape matches shots of beetles, snakes and spiders, apt images for
Shakespeare’s preoccupation with natural denizens. The to-and-fro synthesized strains of the
score also approximates the unpredictable nature of a character’s experience,
as is reflected in Helena’s (Teresa Dahl-Bredine’s) constant manipulation of a
yoyo, an index of her emotional vicissitude. When, towards the close, the characters appear
in smarter dress, having left behind their student-type identities, the
suggestion is that, via a dream-like transformation, a greater calm and
stability have been achieved.
Published in Viewfinder, October 2011, No. 84, 30 • http://bufvc.ac.uk/2011/09/29/october-viewfinder-is-out • British Universities Film & Video
Council • Professor Burnett teaches at Queen’s University, Belfast.
His books include
Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007) and
The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
● Joseph Rivers, the composer of the score, prepared a CD of the soundtrack, which we highly recommend: Amazon.com
● The Internet Movie Database displays information about our film and includes two videos: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787640/
● DVDextras.net lists our film at:
http://dvdextras.net/a-midsummer-nights-dream/
● SALE! Our DVD is available at
CDBaby.com ($10.99) and
Amazon.com ($10.99).
Enjoy!
Thanks for reading.
