Shakespeare's Dream is spirited romp


Familiar favourite's faerie forest is overcrowded

By: Jay Stone

 Calista Flockhart's character, Helena, is plagued with unrequited love for Demetrius, played by Christian Bale. Flockhart's Helena is a definite change from the twitchy nervousness of Ally McBeal.

 In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Kevin Kline's character, Bottom, becomes embroiled in a love squabble between Oberon, King of the Fairies (Rupert Everett, not pictured) and his wife Titania, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, above.

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ***

Starring: Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Christian Bale, Dominic West, David Strathairn, Sophie Marceau

Written and directed by: Michael Hoffman

Rating: PG

Playing at: World Exchange, St. Laurent, South Keys, Coliseum,

A puckish Puck, a top-of-the-line Bottom, the bewitching Tuscan countryside, and Ally McBeal, acting: Given that it's probably too late to criticize the playwright for putting his big comic scene at the end, you couldn't ask for much more spirited Bard than William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This amended, updated but faithful production of the old faerie favourite is a magical film, although there are a couple of caveats. As some early departees at this week's premiere learned, this is Shakespeare, not Tom Stoppard. Despite the big movie-star cast, this is not Shakespeare in Love. It comes complete with Shakespearean language, convoluted phrasing, and those parts where people kill themselves laughing at some lame couplet.

The couplets seem lame because of some rather stilted staging by director Michael Hoffman, who did much better with the beautifully mounted historical piece Restoration. This Dream occurs mostly in an enchanted forest overcrowded with satyrs and nymphs and all manner of greenery (it was filmed in a giant set in Rome's Cinecitta studios.) The effect is claustrophobic rather than playful and the performers are forever dropping their drawers or barely covering their bosoms with long hair, apparently to keep the pace at full, antic spin. There's even a mud fight.

Nor does this particular play include those little rewards, the famous sayings that you recognize. Aside from "the course of true love never did run smooth;" "the apple of his eye;" and Puck's "What fools these mortals be" (Puck should have been a Hollywood producer), A Midsummer Night's Dream leaves you pretty much on your own in the Shakespearean forest.

That being said, it's a familiar tale nonetheless, and an extremely malleable one. Woody Allen did it as movie comedy; Robert Lepage did it as muddy sexual theatre (people in the first three rows of Lepage's production were issued plastic raincoats.)

Hoffman takes the action to 19th-century Tuscany, apparently to take advantage of the fact that the bicycle had just been invented and bicycles are somehow appropriate in the spritely and roguish farce. When Puck says, "Look how I go/Swifter than an arrow from a Tartar's Bow" and hops on his bike, you wonder how Shakespeare managed without a two-wheeler in his stage directions.

The plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably known to everyone. I will now recite from memory, with the occasional direct quote from the Fox Searchlight press kit. Basically, Hermia (Anna Friel) and Lysander (Dominic West) flee into the forest to escape Hermia's Father Egeus (Bernard Hill), who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius (Christian Bale). Demetrius chases the guy who stole his gal, pursued by Helena (Calista Flockhart) who loves him but is unrequited in this regard.

As it happens, they fall into the part of the forest populated by fairies and satyrs, of which this movie has a juicy flock. Among them is Puck (Stanley Tucci) who administers love potions to everyone, although he occasionally mistakes the odd person, resulting in cross-crushes that make the middle section of the film play like Melrose Place with goat horns.

Meanwhile, a troupe of bad actors has gone into the forest to rehearse its excellently titled The Most Lamentable Comedy, the Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. The star is Bottom (Kevin Kline), a ham who believes he can play all the roles. He becomes embroiled in a love squabble between Oberon, King of the Fairies (Rupert Everett, and no comments please) and his wife Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer.)

Among the players, Tucci is delightfully understated (icing the Puck, perhaps?) and Everett has a marvelously calm command of the idiom as Oberon: he appears to be speaking words, rather than declaiming speeches, which is mostly what you get from Pfeiffer. Calista Flockhart is a revelation as Helena: The twitchy nervousness of Ally McBeal has been replaced by an angry and sweet yearning for love. (She does have a speech that gives one pause, in which she begs her lover to use her like a spaniel. It sounds like a bad prison drama.)

What you will remember, however, is Kevin Kline's Bottom, if you'll pardon my saying so. Both spirited and melancholy, he trips lightly over the desire to dominate the play, then returns to dominate the movie. His braying ass, played without the traditional donkey-head mask, growls wonderfully with an astonished stupidity that sounds perfectly donkeyesque. His performance in the play-within-a-play is a small comic masterpiece, both honouring and playing with Shakespeare's words and showing off the ham in Bottom and the bacon in Kline.

It is too bad Hoffman felt it necessary to fall back on the hoary film tradition of showing the movie audience laughing to assure us that this was indeed funny. What fools these mortals be.



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