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The 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' was directed by Peter Brook, and is often known simply as Peter Brook's ''Dream.'' It opened in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon and then moved to the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End in 1971. It was taken on a world tour in 1972-3. Brook's production of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' for the RSC is often described as one of the 20th century's most influential productions of Shakespeare, as it rejected many traditional ideas about the staging of classic drama. ==Concept== Shakespeare's play is set in Athens and a fairy-inhabited forest nearby. Brook's aim was to reject the 19th-century traditions of realism and illusionism in the theatre, and focus instead on locating the play in "the heightened realm of metaphor".〔Gary Jay Williams, ''Our Moonlight Revels'', (University of Iowa Press, 1997), 225.〕 He also wanted to liberate the play from encrusted "''bad'' tradition" so that the actors could feel that they were encountering the text for the first time.〔Brook, quoted by R.A. Foakes, ed. ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (Cambridge UP, 1984), 22-3.〕 As such, he avoided any realist scenery or props. Instead, the set, designed by Sally Jacobs, was a simple white box, with no ceiling and two doors. In Stratford, black drapes were hung above the box to hide the stage machinery; on tour, Brook decided to remove them, leaving stagehands and lighting technicians visible.〔Williams, 224.〕 The purpose of this was to return the stage to the simplicity of the Elizabethan theatre, in which there was little scenery and the sense of location was generated by the poet's words. However, this approach was blended with modern elements: the trees of the forest were represented by giant slinky toys, and Titania's bower was a huge red feather.〔Williams, 224-5; Holland, 108.〕 The fairy magic was represented by circus tricks. For example, the fairies entered on trapeze bars, and the love potion that Puck fetches was a spinning plate on a rod, which Puck handed to Theseus from a trapeze fifteen feet above the stage.〔Williams, 226.〕 When Bottom turned into an ass, he acquired not the traditional ass's head, but a clown's red nose.〔Foakes, 22; Williams 227.〕 The costumes were non-Athenian and non-English Renaissance. Instead, they were a colourful mixture of elements from different times and places. Oberon wore a purple satin gown.〔Williams, 224.〕 Puck wore a yellow jumpsuit from the Chinese circus.〔Williams, 224.〕 The mechanicals were dressed as 20th-century factory workers.〔Williams, 225.〕 The young lovers looked like 1960s "flower children" in tie-dye shirts and ankle-length dresses.〔Williams, 226, 229.〕 There were also unusual casting choices. It had been traditional for the fairies to be played by young children or women, but Brook cast adult men instead, an effect described as "disconcertingly strange and threatening",〔Peter Holland, ed. ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (OUP, 1994), 24.〕 and which made the forest a more frightening, adult place than in earlier productions.〔Foakes, 23.〕 Brook also decided to double the roles of Theseus/Oberon, Hippolyta/Titania, Philostrate/Puck and Egeus/Quince. This was partly to create a smaller, more intimate company, but also to suggest that the fairies were not so much different characters, as different aspects of the human characters' personalities,〔Williams, 224.〕 an idea signified when Theseus and Hippolyta 'became' Oberon and Titania simply by putting on robes.〔Foakes, 23.〕 Brook believed that Theseus and Hippolyta have failed to achieve "the true union as a couple" and work through their quarrels as Oberon and Titania.〔Qtd. by Foakes, 23.〕 The production emphasized, to a level never before seen, the supposed sexual undercurrents of the story of Titania's infatuation with Bottom after he turns into an ass. Brook was influenced by Jan Kott's study of the play in ''Shakespeare Our Contemporary'', in which Kott notes the phallic properties of the donkey, and argues that Oberon deliberately degrades Titania by exposing her to this monstrous sexuality.〔Brook, quoted by Foakes, 23.〕 In Brook's staging, Bottom entered Titania's bower carried by the fairies, one of whom thrust his upraised arm between Bottom's legs to represent a phallus. In a jab at more traditional stagings, the sequence was accompanied by Mendelssohn's Wedding March, a piece of music originally written to be played as an intermezzo between Acts IV and V, but often used in more genteel productions for the final marriage scene of the play.〔Williams, 227; Holland, 72-3.〕 Despite the disturbing undercurrents of this view of sexuality, many audience members found the play witty and affectionate in its treatment of sex, in tune with the spirit of 1960s permissiveness.〔Foakes, 23; Williams 227.〕 The end of the production stressed the idea of community between audience and actors. As Oberon spoke his final lines about sunrise, the house lights slowly rose, so that the audience was visible to each other while Puck spoke the play's closing speech. Upon the line "Give me your hands, if we be friends", the entire cast rushed into the auditorium to shake hands with the audience, turning the theatre into a "lovefest".〔Williams, 231.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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