Hot ice, and wondrous strange snow #1
Adapting A Midsummer Night’s Dream for winter in the Wanamaker
By Dramaturg, Frank Peschier
Part One: Language, form, and the joyful terror of cutting Shakespeare
Undertaking the dramaturgy on A Midsummer Night’s Dream is both an exciting and daunting task. On the one hand, there is no tricksy living author to argue with your cuts, but on the other, there are the thousands who will not take kindly to any perceived butchering of the bard. At Headlong, one of our North stars is treating the canon like work that landed on our desk today. Whilst I would not dare to give Mr Shakespeare notes (except maybe how exactly do you envision this bear chase playing out?)
Whilst I would not dare to give Mr Shakespeare notes (except maybe how exactly do you envision this bear chase playing out?), this gives us the opportunity to draw out elements and tones in the text that serve the vision of directors Holly and Naeem. Where can we find humanity and heroism for Bottom? Tension and power struggle for the human and fairy royalty? Or just land a great joke about amateur dramatics?
The first challenge lies in not accidentally undermining how Shakespeare has already delineated subtext through language. A Midsummer Night's Dream uses MANY forms, including iambic pentameter for nobles, prose for mechanicals/lower class characters and trochaic tetrameter for faeries.
For example, we see Noble Oberon speaking in Iambic:
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows.
Act 2, Scene 1
Poetic forms are also used to demonstrate characters’ relationships to each other. Lovers speak in rhyming couplets when they speak of love, often finishing each other's sentences:
Hermia: Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake.
Lysander: And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake.
Act 2, Scene 2
Elsewhere, we see the mechanicals switch to strained rhyme when performing, demonstrating their failure to mimic the highfalutin style of the upper classes:
O grim lookt night, O night with hue so black,
O night, which ever art, when day is not:
O night, O night, alack, alack, alack.
Act 5, Scene 1
It can seem straightforward to swap a word for a more accessible, modern equivalent or move a line of dialogue to clarify a plot point. However, it is all too easy to discover by doing so that you have completely messed up a rhythm, leading to many hours counting out syllables like a deranged Sesame Street character (one iamb, two iambs, ah-ah-ah!).
