Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theater

A brilliant, insightful resource with a lot of delightful and evocative illustrations. Shakespeare gets some of the credit here, since his play is such a wonderful and odd accumulation of stuff: Greek mythology, Elizabethan workmen, English countryside folklore, and fairy fancy. Consequently, the script has had a particularly varied and rich production history and the author captures a full 400 years of performances in English. To the book's credit, it isn't just a series of descriptions of costume and set designs. It attempts to communicate why different people at different times took different approaches to production. Love it.

Recently, I was the dramaturg for A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the primary jobs of the dramaturg is to research the production history of the play, and as my teacher once told me, "There's no point in re-inventing the wheel." This being said, Our Moonlight Revels is a great place to start.Beginning with the original production and moving to the present, Williams explores several productions of this classical play. He hits all the major productions, such as Peter Brook's 1970 production, Beerholm Tree's 1900 production, and productions by Kean, Vestris, and Reinhardt. The book is divided by theory rather than chronologically. There are chapters devoted to the Wedding-play myth, Modernism and Post-Modernism, Scenic images of the "Empire." Of course no book, can be able to explore every single production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the last four hundred years, but Williams' book gives one landmark productions that can be used for further research. One book can't tell you everything, you have to do some research on your own, but Williams at least can point you in the right direction.The book contains several production photos both in color and in black and white.