Gift of Tongues

By Gina Mallet

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Lust, reasoned the Marquis de Sade, is responsible for ambition, cruelty, avarice and revenge. A couple of centuries before, William Shakespeare had said the same thing, only better, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a sensual, even savage, account of the lunacy of love. Four sexually infatuated Athenians make fools of themselves and try to murder one another, while jealous Oberon casts a spell on unfaithful Titania that leads her to bed down with an ass. With characteristic perversity, Shakespeare presented this demonic fantasy as an ode to nature, one of his loveliest flights of lyric poetry.

In 1970 Peter Brook stripped the Dream bare to reveal a contemporary parable, freeing the play at last from its wrappings of earlier sentimentality--productions shrouded in tulle and Mendelssohn. Post-Brook directors have no choice but to grapple with this evolution. It is a task clearly beyond Edward Berkely, who has directed the revival at Joseph Papp's Newhouse Theater in Manhattan. He has interred the play in 20th century sentimentality. The actors do their own thing, and the play becomes farce. Unloved Helena is a coy baby-talker and Poltergeist Puck a Harlem Globetrotter; the fairy attendants are reduced to midgets, and Bottom bloats into a wisecracking ham.

Cheap laughs won in this easy way merely emphasize Shakespeare's use of characters as megaphones. His words are what matter, and of the cast only Oberon (George Hearn) and Titania (Kathleen Widdoes) can get their tongues round blank verse. This raises an overdue point. William Shakespeare has done a lot for Joseph Papp. Surely, Papp could return the compliment and insist that actors be given voice lessons when he mounts a Shakespeare play at one of the seven Manhattan theaters under his dominion. Gina Mallet

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