It is hard to believe that the English director Deborah Warner (Oxfordshire, 66 years old), a true authority on Shakespeare, had not faced the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “The explanation is simple and has to do with my first experience as a spectator,” she says after a rehearsal at the Teatro Real. “When I was nine years old I saw Peter Brook’s historic production in Bristol and decided I wanted to dedicate myself to this.” He left that performance with the desire to make theater and the certainty, shared by many directors of his generation, that there was little to add to the “dazzling Dream” brookiano.
Almost six decades later, Warner has found in the operatic adaptation that Benjamin Britten composed for the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival a “perfect excuse” with which to settle his particular pending score. “There have been many weeks of intense rehearsals, with some doubts at the beginning, until discovering that the work is not black or white, but an infinite range of nuances,” he says about the new staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which opens tomorrow at the Madrid Coliseum. “Now I think it may be Britten’s most accessible opera, but a month ago it wasn’t so clear to me,” he admits.
It was the composer himself, whose death will mark half a century in December, who was in charge of writing the libretto in record time. Over the course of a few weeks, and with the help of his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, he reduced the original text practically by half. “They cut a lot and reorganized the complex labyrinth of the plot, but without altering the essence of this sensational comedy,” says Warner. “In fact, in the entire opera we only find one line that does not come from the pen of Shakespeare, whose writing, by the way, is loaded with music, that of the demanding iambic verse.”
After his time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Warner won over audiences with his imaginative revisions of the classics. His Richard II with Fiona Shaw in the role of the king, his Medea in a psychological key or his radical reading of The school of gossip They bear the mark of a style that does not hesitate to take risks. “There are directors who come to the theater with a life jacket on, but I prefer to jump into the water without knowing if I will make it or not,” he boasts. “I like to explore as I go with the actors and, if a good idea appears, I follow it even if it betrays the concept I brought from home.”
The opera tells how, during a night of spells and misunderstandings, four lovers find their feelings disrupted by the magic of fairies until, at dawn, order is restored and everything returns to normal. “In Britten’s libretto the action does not start in the real world of the court of Athens, but goes directly to the universe of fantasy, an exclusive territory of childhood, with its mixture of charm and anarchy,” explains Warner. “And, since the forest in which the characters move is governed by ambiguity and artifice, it made no sense to recreate that landscape as a set.”
The power of the word
Instead, we find an installation made of fragments of nature. “My approach refers, in a certain way, to Elizabethan theater,” continues the British stage director. “In that tradition, the forest was above all the stage itself, that empty space that Brook spoke of.” And he adds: “In Shakespeare’s England it was enough to Wooden O (as the circular theater of the Globe was known) and the power of the word to contain all the possibilities: with very few elements the public could travel to the fields of France, to the wasteland of king lear or to the remote island of The storm”.
During the production, which will be on display until March 22, Warner resorts to several “doublings” that multiply the presence of some characters. “The elf Puck, for example, appears divided between an aerial acrobat and an actor who recites the text,” he confirms. Something similar happens with children: while some extras move around the stage, the white voices of the ORCAM sing from the pit. “I know this may be controversial, but at that age it is not easy to sing, run and jump at the same time,” he justifies his decision. “This way they can deploy all that energy without losing vocal quality.”
Maestro Ivor Bolton will direct the absolute premiere of this co-production with the Royal Ballet and Opera of London and the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. “You don’t need to be an expert to perceive in the score the brilliance with which Britten distinguishes and makes the four worlds of the work collide.” Crystalline Ringers in the Fairy Kingdom; greater lyricism in the Lovers passages; brass and bassoons for the Artisans and solemn chords at the Court. “And above all there is the world of sleeping, which is one of the composer’s great territories,” he says. “No one has written dream music like him.”
Countertenor Iestyn Davies, soprano Liv Redpath and bass Clive Bayley lead the almost entirely British cast of this DreamBritten’s third opera that Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Teatro Real, entrusts to Deborah Warner. “I couldn’t refuse, because the working conditions of Billy Budd (which premiered in Madrid in 2017) and Peter Grimes (in 2021) were truly exceptional,” he celebrates. “When you have a team like that you can take risks, try, make mistakes and start again. “El Real is one of the few theaters in the world where it is still possible to create a real production.”
The sense of latent danger that characterizes many of Warner’s productions finds in this love of a summer night a dramaturgical vein that flees from morality. “Shakespeare never tells you what to think,” he warns. “Describe all possible forms of human behavior and let them speak for themselves.” More than four decades have passed since his first role as The stormat the head of his company Kick Theatre, and assures that he still has many miles to sail: “More than four centuries later, Shakespeare is still many years ahead of us.”