Shakespeare Done Giddy

Avocado (aka Younger Girl) is away at a sleepover tonight, and the Spouse is still out of town, so Sarcasm Girl and I had orrechiete with pesto for dinner and watched A Midsummer Night's Dream. The 1968 one directed by Peter Hall before he was Sir Peter Hall, the one with an amazing cast including Diana Rigg, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, David Warner, Michael Jayston, and a slender, wicked Ian Holm as Puck. In certain ways it creaks: the looping is obvious, with no ambient noise (this is what one picks up when one is married to a sound designer), and the special effects are primative. The first scene, the expository lump with Theseus and Hippolyta and Egeus asking if he can pretty-please kill his daughter if she doesn't marry the guy he's chosen, is draggy, but I've never seen a production in which that scene wasn't draggy. And then, between the rude mechanicals, who are hysterical, and the fairies, and Puck (who is accompanied, when he speeds off, by Warner Bros. speeding bullet sound effects), and the lovers in the forest, it takes off and never looks back.

Diana Rigg, who plays Helena, is impeccably gorgeous as always--so much so that it's hard to believe that anyone would find her less gorgeous than Helen Mirren's Hermia, who is charming and tiny and rather gamin. The scene where the disparity in their heights becomes an issue is hysterically funny. And Judi Dench, wearing a body stocking that left absolutely nothing to the imagination--I thought at first that she was naked--is young and luscious and sensual, and as far from Queen Elizabeth or M as one can imagine.

Sebastian Shaw, who played Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, plays Peter Quince; Paul Rogers is a killer Bottom; and Bill Travers, who I first saw in The Admirable Crichton but remember primarily from Born Free, does a priceless bit as Snout, the Wall. And Holm appears to be having so much fun.

I wouldn't call this the definative Midsummer Night's Dream, but it is wonderful, fast, and slightly goofy. Give it a try.