Reflection Of Acting Company In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Amulya Parmar
World Literature 3B
Mrs. Mack
May 21, 2014
Acting Company: Reflection

To act out a play, one must first live the play. The emotion, twists, and plot are just variables that entail the actor’s and director’s decisions to truly embody a character in a play like William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What I held most important to me as I directed my acting company was to preserve the essence of the play and its lines while adding more depth and layers to a character and a scene.
For example in my interpretation of the play, when Robin speaks his final line, he produces a love potion out of his pocket that will essentially be the core solution to the lover’s problems. We were looking to create a clearer effect of understanding between the audience and the play on how Robin will go about solving this dilemma between lovers. In short, the purpose of Robin revealing the love potion is to allow the audience to bridge Shakespeare’s gap between the ending and the “amends” that Robin describes making in the end of the play, an end that is basically left unfinished. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s final line states that “[He] Robin will make amends” (5.1.455) and is supposed to act as closure for the audience that the lovers and their fates will be okay. However, in the ending of Puck’s speech there is never a feeling of ultimate peace one is left with. Even though the message at the end is that he wants us all to feel that it was just a dream, it is not an entirely “as yielding as a dream” (5.1.445). Even though there is a happy ending, one cannot forget some of the darker undercurrents in the play. These are not as easy to pick out because they a...

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... outlook throughout the play, Shakespeare seems to mask it through his extensive use of flowery use language, as mentioned before, and the purpose of adding inflection to Puck’s voice and hand gestures was to make those decisions protrude towards the audience. For example, when Robin said, “If shadows we have offended, think but this and all is mended” (5.1.440-441) he only lightly infers that it would only be fixed if you forgot about it and thought of it like a dream. He does not truly promise to fix the dilemma, and we emphasized that through the inflections of his voice. Another example in which Robin’s line is emphasized is when he blames this dilemma for the fairies blindly following “Hecate’s team” (5.1.132-133).
In conclusion, I strongly believe that my artistic choices led to the audience having a deeper and stronger understanding of the play itself.