The Beeb butchers the Bard in a Midsummer Night’s muddle
Queen Titania snogged Queen Hippolyta. A randy Demetrius groped his love-rival, Lysander. Playwright Peter Quince had a sex-change. even Snug the carpenter ended up smooching with one of the male extras.
When screenwriter Russell T. Davies, the creator of shows like Queer As Folk and Cucumber, decided to adapt Shakespeare’s magical comedy
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (BBC1), he saw possibilities that required a little rewriting. In his version, the whole play turned on one punchline, when lovelorn Helena gazes on the romantic chaos around her and exclaims: ‘Oh hell! I see you are all bent.’
Davies, of course, was taking the line out of context, but that was no different to just about every other scrap of dialogue, as he butchered the text of the Bard’s best-known, most-loved tale down to a muddled 90 minutes.
Snippets from half-a-dozen other plays were thrown into the mix, as well as telly catchphrases — Matt Lucas, as Bottom, loudly reprised his Little Britain gag, ‘ I’m a lady!’ That’s not in the First Folio.
And the ending got a radical rewrite, as fascist dictator Theseus (John Hannah) collapsed and died. Had he been poisoned? Was it a heart attack, brought on by a malevolent fairy? Perhaps he choked on the original text.
For the first 30 minutes, Davies was back in the universe of Doctor Who, the classic sci-fi serial he revived for the BBC in 2005. Theseus’s palace in Athens looked like a dalek was lurking round every corner. neo-nazi emblems hung from the walls and were blazoned over the floors.
Stormtroopers with blasters scowled from behind shining black visors. Hannah stroked the epaulettes of his uniform, while his flunkeys brandished iPads. everyone seemed to be waiting for a blue police box to materialise, and a wiseacre in a floppy hat and long knitted scarf to emerge.
The most efficient way to pare down the play to an hour-and-a-half would have been to ditch all that. A Midsummer night’s Dream starts slowly, all exposition and in-jokes. The story we love doesn’t begin until Act Two, when the fairy rulers Oberon and Titania have an almighty row, and bad-boy Puck is despatched to play a practical joke on the Queen.
Davies didn’t alter that part of the production, and so it was spellbinding. The enchanted forest and its sprites were modelled on the great modern fantasy movie Pan’s Labyrinth — with his ram’s horns and smouldering skin, Oberon (the menacing nonso Anozie) was more demon than fairy king.
Maxine Peake made a terrifying Titania, with tattoos running over her scalp. And Lucas was a delight as the innocent, preening Bottom, too self-satisfied to notice he’d grown a pair of furry ears. But Davies couldn’t stay true to the spirit of the play for long, and soon he was rewriting the plot.
We returned to the Doctor Who set, where Theseus was keeping Hippolyta in a strait-jacket — until she burst free, sprouted rainbow wings and emerged from her cocoon.
As she flew off with Titania, the fairies tore up the nazi banners and turned them into ribbons. elaine Paige as ‘Mistress’ Quince beamed at everyone, and Snug ( the comedian Javone Prince) snuggled a stormtrooper. What a gay play!
Other British traditions were being ripped to shreds on An Immi
grant’s Guide To Britain (C4), a gloating look at how refugees and migrants are undermining the culture that offered them safe haven. A malicious Pole called Kamil mocked our reluctance to complain by setting up a coffee stall and serving hot drinks laced with Tabasco and chilli. even when he stirred them with his finger, no one protested. Then a Hungarian woman marched round Shepherd’s Bush, trying to engage locals in conversation: no one wanted to chat, until she mentioned the weather, and then people wouldn’t shut up.
Politeness and small talk, of course, are the very things that have enabled us to live in peaceful independence on these crowded islands for so many centuries. Why any european immigrant would want to come here and then mock those qualities out of existence is beyond understanding.