Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out.
Famous, of course, for reviving Doctor Who, Davies here showed a similar fondness for jumbling together different eras — not, admittedly, a betrayal of Shakespeare’s original. The idea that Theseus’s soon-to-be wife Hippolyta was his prisoner of war also has some basis in the play — although the fact she was wheeled into the distinctly fascist Athenian court like Hannibal Lecter was maybe pushing it a little. Meanwhile, the various lovers were planning their escape by iPad.
We then cut to a pub called the Old Mechanicals, set in a nearby Elizabethan street, where a carefully multicultural selection of modern Brits were discussing their forthcoming production of Pyramus and Thisbe. And from there it was off to the woods, where the Doctor Who influence was again hard to ignore. In 1967, the Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells wrote of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ‘Over-exploitation of the play’s opportunities for spectacle has too long a history’. Now Davies’s version extended that history by another 49 years, as the CGI went into overdrive.
At times, in fact, the visuals threatened to overshadow the shifting loves — especially as, in this 90-minute version, those loves had to shift so quickly. The main question, though, was how on earth Davies was going to combine that dark opening with his essentially jolly view of young love.
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