‘Your play needs no excuse’: Pyramus and Thisbe in the Dreams of Hoffman, Hytner, Hill and Holmes
Terri Bouros describes a moment in Michael Hoffman’s 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside the text of the play for the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works. The focus of Bouros’s note is the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe by the mechanicals, specifically Hoffman’s treatment of Thisbe’s dying soliloquy delivered by Flute (Sam Rockwell):
‘… [T]he campy, tongue-in-cheek delivery suddenly changed in mid-line to an unexpected and powerful seriousness. The young actor playing Thisbe removed his wig, lowered his voice to his natural pitch, and continued in his grief for the death of his lover and for his own suicide. The resultant silence in the onstage audience contributed to the heightened emotion of this scene’.¹
Rockwell’s performance is a departure from the moment as written in the play, the whole of the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe traditionally offering a farcically terrible version of the tragedy to round off Shakespeare’s comic treatment of young love throughout the play. Bouros’s citation of Hoffman’s film suggests that the director’s approach to making Flute’s performance of Thisbe both sincere and moving is a notable shift away from the traditional approach. The film’s release at the very end of the twentieth century perhaps marks a shift in the way Flute, the mechanicals, and Dream as a play would be adapted in the new millennium.
Certainly, Nicholas Hytner’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre earlier this year, a production about which both Gemma and Ronan have written recently, made a choice reminiscent of that of Hoffman. The performance of Pyramus and Thisbe rightfully drew some of the biggest laughs of the night, including what Ronan described as ‘the best version of Pyramus’s ludicrously overlong and overblown suicide which [he had] ever witnessed’. However, in the positive spirit of the production as a whole, the mechanicals were never allowed to be reduced to figures of ridicule. Hammed Animashaun’s ludicrous performance as Bottom overplaying Pyramus was contrasted with Jermaine Freeman’s turn as Flute, delivering a sincere version of Thisbe’s dying speech just as powerful as that of Rockwell in Hoffman’s film twenty years earlier.
Speaking Thisbe’s ‘O Sisters Three, / Come, come to me / With hands as pale as milk’ (5.1.319–21), Flute invited Hippolyta (Gwendoline Christie), Hermia (Isis Hainsworth) and Helena (Tessa Bonham Jones) to join hands with him over the lifeless Pyramus. This not only imbued the speech with greater poignancy, but also blurred the lines further between Pyramus and Thisbe and Dream, the affective nature of Flute’s performance of Thisbe lending Hytner’s entire production with a keen sense of depth and sincerity.
As a result, the earlier comedy felt warmer, and my affection for the mechanicals all the more genuine. This was underscored perfectly by Theseus (Oliver Chris) also being authentically won over by the mechanicals’ performance: his line ‘No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse’ (5.1.336) was delivered entirely straight where other productions often play it as disingenuous.
Dominic Hill’s much darker production of Dream at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre opted for the more traditional approach to Flute (Joshua Miles) playing Thisbe. Hill certainly wanted us to be laughing at Flute as he drew out Thisbe’s death more and more, resulting in one of the production’s most uncomfortable moments. The newly married couples derided the mechanicals throughout, with Hill’s versions of the young lovers becoming almost violent towards them at points. Theseus’s (Kieran Hill) call for ‘no epilogue’ in Regent’s Park was a thinly-veiled attempt to aggressively get what he saw as a group of low-class idiots off the stage.
Sean Holmes’s carnivalesque Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe arguably fell somewhere in the middle of these two interpretations. The director’s approach to staging Pyramus and Thisbe fitted the barmy nature of his entire production, following Bottom’s (Jocelyn Jee Esien) exaggerated death of Pyramus with an equally over-the-top end for Flute’s (Billy Seymour) Thisbe, complete with exploding blood packs. The mechanicals’ status in this production as ridiculous caricatures was maintained by their performance at Theseus (Peter Bourke) and Hippolyta’s (Victoria Elliot) wedding, but the playing field was somewhat levelled by Holmes making the wedding party equally cartoonish. Theseus arguably became the butt of more jokes than anyone, an upper-class twit struggling to keep control of his own nuptials — perhaps underlined most aptly by Bottom openly running off with his new wife Hippolyta when Theseus declares ‘Lovers, to bed’ (5.1.343).²
Holmes certainly garnered genuine affection for his mechanicals from the Globe audience when I experienced his production, engendered further by having the role of Starveling played by a different groundling audience member for each performance — a feature of the production Gemma will discuss further in her upcoming article. But there’s no doubt that, as enjoyable as they were, the mechanicals at the Globe lacked the depth and sincerity seen in Hytner’s production. Both Holmes and Hytner, however, demonstrate the shift Hoffman signalled in his film, something which Hill’s production failed to recognise. Presenting the mechanicals as being contemptuously mocked by the upper echelons of Athenian society is much less appealing today than reimagining them as a loveable group of amateurs to root for who, ultimately, succeed.
It’s possible that this change is linked to a wider cultural shift away from the postmodern cynicism and detachment of the late twentieth century, where Hill’s dark, hard-edged Dream certainly feels like it originates from. The perceived return to sincerity and affect identified within the early years of the twenty-first century has been described as a ‘metamodern’ structure of feeling, with sites such as Notes on Metamodernism emerging to catalogue this shift. Whether or not Hoffman’s and Hytner’s treatment of Thisbe’s death is metamodern is possibly a question too big to introduce at this point. But the potential shift towards metamodernism is something my research has touched upon more and more, and it’s a topic I’ll certainly return to in future posts. As far as Flute’s performance of Thisbe, experiencing such different interpretations on stage this year — as well as revisiting Hoffman’s film — brought home to me how much of an impact a change to a short sequence of Pyramus and Thisbe can have on the tenor of a production of Dream, and on my personal reaction to it.
[1] Terri Bouros, in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, 2016). Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK. p. 1131
[2] Thanks to Gemma for her help with my reading (and occasional misremembering!) of Holmes’s production in particular for this article.
