With almost no evidence as to how the fairies were originally staged in A Midsummer Night's Dream, directors vary in their visions of the play.
The ambiguity of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream leaves a director with an extremely large set of options when it comes to putting them on stage. From Pre-Raphaelite to cyperpunk, the setting must depend on how the director envisages the fairies and their place in the play’s world.
Since we have no idea how the original production dressed Puck, Oberon, Titania and their companions, it is up to each production to decide what “fairies” mean to them. The 1999 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream opted for a lush, romantic approach, with plenty of flowers, gauze and languorous lounging. Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett, as Titania and Oberon, looked as if they’d just wandered out of a pre-Raphaelite oil painting, whilst Stanley Tucci’s Puck, with horns and leaves, hovered somewhere between a fawn and a satyr. They all fitted splendidly in the picturesque and dreamlike wood outside Athens created by director Michael Wood.
This approach doesn’t suit everyone, however. One experienced director has warned against this very romantic, nineteenth-century view of fairies as a “dangerous whimsy” for audiences and theatre companies who no longer believe in the supernatural as the people of the Renaissance did. One solution to this problem is changing the play’s setting to emphasize the wildness and even danger which the fairies represent to those who venture into their domain. Casting the fairies as ravers in a modern urban setting, or futuristic cyberpunks, means this feral element to be explored more fully, getting the audience away from the cutesy picturebook associations of the word “fairy”. Though a cyberpunk called Peaseblossom has got to be a rather challenging role...
Other directors see the fairies as essentially symbolic, dwelling in the characters’ internal landscape, rather than a definite part of their external world. Of course, this doesn’t provide an answer; it simply opens up more questions as to how you should costume a symbol! One extremely effective production used mime makeup and heavily stylized movement to keep the fairies in a vague middle ground somewhere between statues, dreams and people. This provided an interesting contrast between the fairies and the human characters who moved and spoke “naturally”, but were being infiltrated and influenced by these weird figures who moved invisibly amongst them.
We can never know how Shakespeare intended the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be staged, or indeed how the original audience responded to them. Though this might be a loss to scholars, it does mean directors are forced to present their own vision of the fairies each time the play is performed.
