The Eternal Dream

by Neil Armfield

set design by Dale Ferguson

Later in life, Benjamin Britten’s version opened up the theatrical possibilities of opera for me in a way I had never imagined. Elijah Moshinsky’s mid-1970s production for the Australian Opera was the first “modern” production of an opera I had ever seen. This, coming after The Royal Shakespeare Company’s world tour of Peter Brook’s seminal production of Shakespeare’s play, was a reminder of how contemporary, how playful, and how open to interpretation this story is.

Britten, the greatest English-language opera composer, wrote his treatment of Shakespeare’s play in 1960. This marked the end of an extraordinary fifteen-year period of creativity during which he composed nearly all of his great works: Peter Grimes, Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Gloriana, and The Turn of the Screw. He wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream quickly, and, as always, with an absolute clarity of purpose. Britten’s libretto cuts ruthlessly from the play and right at the start plunges us all into the confusion, mystery, and eerie beauty of the fairy world in the forest.

Despite being set in and around mythical Athens, the opera places us in a common dream of author, composer, and audience alike. To an extent, this can be said of any dramatic work — the artistic process makes any world a dream world, and the stage provides a symbolic conjuring of reality. This delicious truth is even more true (if there can be gradations of truth!) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: it deliberately brings the subconscious to light, releasing the submerged forces of the imagination, of fear, of sexual desire, of play.

A perfect work of theatre, the opera is itself about the creation of a work of theatre and this lovely symmetry underpins the entire opera: it is a dream about a dream and a play about putting on a play. Britten, whose operas include one for children called Let’s Make An Opera!, loved the self-conscious nature of the stage — for him, the creative process of theater was always connected to the beauty and intense focus of child’s play.

Designer Dale Ferguson and I went recently to the vast scenic studio where the back and side walls of our set were being painted. As we looked up at the towering aquamarine dreamscape, where strange dark birds and trees grow down from the sky, the painter asked us why that world is upside down! The answer lies in the text: the conflict between Oberon and Tytania has seen “the seasons alter” so that a witness to this transformed world “now knows not which is which.”

But also, of course, it is a dream, and Dale and I wanted to release the space from gravity. Britten’s extraordinary music floats and shimmers, drifts and breathes with the hypnotic pulse of the human body. We are, in a sense, inside the mind, inside a kind of released imagination where the translucent skin of reality lifts and falls with the slow rhythms of enchanted sleep. And so, our Dream transpires underneath what we call “the veil of sleep” (or sometimes less poetically “the sleep sheet”) — a skin of sea-green transparency that hovers above the stage like the surface of the river Lethe, the Greek underworld’s legendary “sea of oblivion.”

One of the glories of Shakespearean drama is the inclusiveness of his worlds — he plays with a spectrum of humanity that runs from rich to poor, from powerful to humble. Our production aims to invite you into this world of the opera so that you may see yourselves embraced by it as Shakespeare’s audience no doubt would have done. We invite you to see yourselves in the lovers, lost in the indignities of sexual pursuit — to see yourselves in the imaginative play of Peter Quince and his “rude mechanicals,” working hard to put on a play themselves.

In making our production here in the U.S., we are drawn to the idea of an American Athens (if not quite Athens, Texas). We look to the period of the opera’s composition as a clue to its setting. We think about the optimism and new beginnings of America’s own Camelot, the neo-classical confidence of the Capitol in the early 1960’s, and allow this to draw us playfully from our present, our watching world of 2009. Shakespeare’s Athens, of course, was hardly in Greece! He writes his workmen as Englishmen, and we know that, wherever a story was set, his actors dressed in their own — albeit their best — clothes: the clothes of their audience.

These are the thoughts swimming in my head a few weeks before beginning rehearsals for our opera. After Billy Budd last April, it is a pleasure to return to Houston to play on your magnificent stage with all the forces of this exquisite work.

I hope we do it justice!

Neil Armfield
November, 2008