Midsummer Night's Dream Film by Jiri Trnka's

Few plays describe a magical world more vividly than Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With its fairies, transformations, and contrast between the city and wilderness, the plays lends itself well to the visual-centric world of movies. Among the directors to be attracted to it was Czech puppeteer Jiří Trnka, who adapted it at the height of his career in 1959. As part of its Trnka festival the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting Trnka’s 35mm film Midsummer (Sen noci svatojánské), providing audiences with a rare chance to fully appreciate its details and Václav Trojan’s classical score.

A Puppet Ballet

Although the puppetry was done with stop-motion, it is uncommonly graceful. Lysander, reimagined by Trnka as an artsy flautist, pirouettes beneath Hermia’s window and shimmies up her wall. The rude mechanicals despair of ever competing with the pageant they see being rehearsed in the town square. And the great duke Theseus promenades through his puppet theatre palace with his Amazonian bride. Trnka did not attempt to translate Shakespeare’s language. Instead, the movie is narrated fairy-tale style by a third-person voice that occasionally dips into first-person to describe authorities such as Oberon and Peter Quince. Trojan provides characters with their own motifs, used as they dance in and out of the frame.

Playful Puck and his Authoritarian Master

Trnka’s take on Oberon and Puck’s relationship is the movie’s most tonally distinct aspect. Wrathful Oberon appears in flashes of lighting and frost, a harsh contrast to fairy queen Titania’s flower bevy and cape of insectoid fairies. Puck is depicted as an easily-distracted teenager who enjoys shapeshifting into bunnies. It is Oberon who orders him to transform Bottom the weaver’s head into that of an ass; Puck seems to feel some sympathy for the clueless amateur actor. Trnka’s designs for the demigods emphasize how endearing or off-putting their inhuman behavior can be. The fairies’ enormous eyes and lack of mouths make them seem alien and allowed Trnka to use tricks of lighting to cast all sorts of ambiguous expressions on them.

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The movie contains lots of humor, although it is more amusing and clever than gut-bustingly hilarious. Much of it is absurd: Lysander and Demetrios start fencing in the middle of a conversation; Egeus gets locked out of his house. Trnka apparently also had a soft spot for the mechanicals, given the more dignified treatment their theatrics are given and that they move with the same fluidity as the higher-class people and fairies. The ballet presentation and limitless possibilities of animation give the movie a much dreamier quality than a stage production using real physicality could manage. It’s a must-see for fans of the play. It’s also a work that will dazzle fans of animation with how much Trnka’s studio was able to achieve with the technology of the time.

About the Author: Jacob Davis

Jacob Davis has lived in Chicago since 2014 when he started writing articles about theatre, opera, and dance for a number of review websites. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Theatre, where he specialized in the history of modernist dramatic literature and criticism. While there, he interned as a dramaturge for Dance Heginbotham developing concepts for new dance pieces. His professional work includes developing the original jazz performance piece The Blues Ain’t a Color with Denise LaGrassa, which played at Theater Wit. He has also written promotional materials for theatre companies including Silk Road Rising.

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