Hot ice, and wondrous strange snow #2

Adapting A Midsummer Night’s Dream for winter in the Wanamaker

By Dramaturg, Frank Peschier

Part two: Expectations, climate, and where we place the emphasis

A Midsummer Night’s Dream occupies a particular place in our cultural imagination. Once you’ve twiddled around cutting the ‘my Lords’ and found the right words (anyone got something one syllable for ‘snow leopard’?), there’s the tightrope of expectations still to navigate.

As one of the most accessible, family-friendly and widely studied plays, Midsummer’s motifs permeate beyond their context. There are moments that audiences feel in their bones; donkey heads, nodding violets and sweet dreams. They expect magic and laughs alongside anything darker we might want to uncover. The balancing act is ensuring we lose none of the play’s greatest hits, whilst drawing out themes and clarifying language that we hope will allow audiences to hear the play anew.

Staging the play in winter draws us towards this image and its resonance with our present climate anxieties.

Hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.
Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1

And its perhaps unexpected resonance with the impact of global warming:

The Oxe hath therefore stretch’d his yoak in vaine,
The Ploughman lost his sweat, and the green Corn
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain’d a beard:
The fold stands empty in the drowned field.
Titania, Act 2, Scene 1

Understanding this speech through both a historical lens and climate change today invites us to see the fairy world not as a whimsical escape but as a subversion of the play’s Athenian “reality". A reality that is itself unstable, populated by the mythic through the wedding of an Amazon warrior Queen and a Minotaur slayer. How can our edit illuminate such inversions of status, of natural order, whilst making sure we maintain clarity of story?

This is where we then take it back to language. Where does it reflect the play’s internal dichotomies - snow and summer, the order of Athens and the freedom of the forest, and most crucially, between waking and dreaming? Rather than looking to change Shakespeare’s words, everything and anything we trim or tweak should serve the meaning, whether that is authored through words or form.

That certain elements are highlighted in this production does not mean they have been added to Shakespeare's parents and original (Act 2, Scene 1), but simply a matter of where Headlong has decided to place the emphasis. By asking what it means to dream today, we are inviting the audience to hear it through a contemporary ear - to feel the text resonate in a world shaped by modern politics, hopes and fears. And hopefully, to still be placed under a candlelit spell.