A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Michiharu Okubo
Shakespeare Our Contemporary? On Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was selected as the opera for the 2025 Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival (OMF). And with the production being conducted by Nodoka Okisawa, who was named the festival’s principal guest conductor in 2024, it attracted attention for several reasons. For one, this signified a passing of the baton from the festival’s founder, the world-renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, who passed away in 2024. It also coincided with the year marking 90 years since Ozawa’s birth. Okisawa last conducted an opera at OMF in 2022, leading Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.”
It is well known that Ozawa’s vision was to stage world-class opera in Matsumoto by focusing primarily on modern and contemporary works. Looking at the list of performances to date, the first festival—then called Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto (until 2014)—featured Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” (directed by Julie Taymor), while 2013 saw a performance of Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (directed by Laurent Pelly), which won the 58th Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.
Since the festival adopted its current name, OMF (2015–), its opera portion has included performances by the Seiji Ozawa Music Academy’s Opera Project, but the festival’s main orchestra, the Saito Kinen Orchestra (SKO), has been seen in the pit rather less frequently. Since 2015, it has only played three operas: Berlioz’s “Béatrice et Bénédict” (2015), Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” (2019), and, post-pandemic, the aforementioned “The Marriage of Figaro.”
In that sense, Okisawa’s appointment by Ozawa as the festival’s first principal guest conductor in 2024 has been seen as signaling an increase in opportunities for modern and contemporary operas to be staged at the OMF once again. The “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” reviewed here was the first production under this new arrangement.
And what an exquisite selection it was. Premiered in 1960, the work is Britten’s masterpiece. In addition, the original “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a well-known work in Japan, where Shakespearean productions are said to rival those in the English-speaking world in number. Of course, the timing of the performance in Matsumoto—summer—also played a part. This particular production premiered at the Opéra de Lille in France in 2022, receiving rave reviews from European critics, and its Japanese premiere was realized in Matsumoto.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Tsuyoshi Yamada
The libretto, co-written by Britten and his partner Peter Pears, cuts nearly half of the original’s dialogue. While some of the scenes are rearranged, they use Shakespeare’s words almost entirely as written, adding only a single line. The fundamental structure of the work thus remains intact: the aristocratic society of Athens, the world of the fairies who rule the forest outside the city, and the world of the Athenian artisans (“Rustics”). However, the entire opening of Act I from the original play is cut. This significantly weakens the overarching framework of an aristocratic patriarchy. Instead, the opera begins with the fairies’ choir singing in the forest, allowing for an interpretation that emphasizes the original work’s fantasy elements.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Michiharu Okubo
In the original, Shakespeare has the nobles and fairies speak in blank verse, while the craftsmen speak in prose. Notably among the characters, the fairy Puck speaks not only in iambic pentameter and rhyming tetrameter; she is given a considerably free linguistic mode befitting his trickster character. The music-historical assessment is that in his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Britten succeeded in transcribing these linguistic characteristics of the original text directly into music. With the exception of Puck, who narrates without singing, the diverse characters’ lines follow the natural rhythms of English, making them easy to understand. Yet sung alongside Britten’s uniquely complex soundscapes and accompaniments, they evoke a rich spectrum of emotions beyond the literal meaning of the words. Notably, making the fairy king Oberon a countertenor role emphasizes the otherworldly nature of the fairy realm. Furthermore, the ingenious choice of Puck as the narrator ensures not only the smooth progression of the play but also a sustained connection with the audience—both defining characteristics of the work.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Michiharu Okubo
Laurent Pelly, the production’s stage director, set designer, and costume designer, opted for a minimalist—or rather, near-empty—setting. This involved the reduction of concrete elements down to the very minimum, leaving only a jet-black floor that reflects the stage and lights, and mirrors positioned behind the stage. The only tangible objects he employs are two beds for the lovers, the craftsmen’s bicycles, and a makeshift stage used during the play-within-a-play in the final act.
At the outset, Hermia (Nina van Essen) lies alone on a bed at center stage. With the forest opening, distinct from the original text, Pelly thus presents the “dream motif”—that everything unfolding could be Hermia’s dream—by magically and realistically “reimagining” the omitted opening passage.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Tsuyoshi Yamada
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Michiharu Okubo
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Tsuyoshi Yamada
Fairies (a children’s choir) appear in the darkness, small lights attached to their heads, while Oberon (Nils Wanderer) and Tytania (Sydney Mancasola) float in the air in white makeup. Puck (Faith Prendergast), suspended in mid-air by an extendable wire, showcases her physical abilities with fluid, acrobatic movements. Meanwhile, the lovers remain in pajamas throughout, while the artisans wear costumes that could be called modern (though the era they come from is unclear) and are required to perform quite a lot of movement in the “empty space.” At times, the two beds are unfixed and move around the stage like props.
The mirrors behind the stage are movable, and shortly after the curtain rises, revealing first the conductor and performers, they take in the auditorium as well. Near the curtain call, Oberon and Tytania perform their final song from the left and right ends of the auditorium’s upper tiers, synchronized with the fairies’ song (performed by the children’s choir) on stage. This presentation envelops not only the audience, but the conductor and orchestra as well, within both “this” and “that” world. While immersive isn’t the right word for it, this staging emphasizes spatial unity. It leaves a peculiar aftertaste, too, suggesting that perhaps all this—no, perhaps we, the audience, too—are merely part of a jestful night’s dream experienced by Hermia, who is depicted here much like an independent, modern woman.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream ©Tsuyoshi Yamada
The original work’s dichotomies—order and chaos, civilization and nature, reality and the surreal—are not particularly emphasized in the staging. Nor does the production foreground the Shakespearean work’s “problematic” aspects, such as patriarchy and class disparity, themes frequently taken up in present-day feminist and postcolonial criticism. Furthermore, the scene of the craftsmen’s play-within-a-play (“Pyramus and Thisbe”), for which Britten composed the music as a parody of Italian opera, is neither staged to one-sidedly mock them nor, conversely, to deliberately showcase the common people’s latent power or ability to challenge authority. The “interspecies romance” between Bottom, the craftsman turned donkey, and Tytania also elicits only quiet laughter. That’s mostly because, in “this” world, all binary oppositions have been dissolved—something that would normally lead to chaos, but does not. Instead, everything blends into a seamless whole, simply existing as it is. That is the defining characteristic of Pelly’s direction.
And that is precisely why both the lovers and the artisans, rather than being defined by class distinctions, come to resemble what we view as “ordinary”—people much like ourselves, the audience, occasionally glimpsed in a mirror. And the “otherworldliness” of the fairies becomes a representation of the metaverse—a world that naturally and effortlessly coexists with the lived existence of us “ordinary people.”
The music created by Nodoka Okisawa and SKO, born from meticulous consideration of every detail in Britten’s score and alternating between bold restraint and delicate sparkle, fills the theater with a singular, vivid, graceful sound. The singers invited from overseas, possessing formidable vocal prowess, respond to Pelly’s direction with minimal yet precise movements. And the OMF Junior Chorus, as the fairies’ choir, adds a beautiful flourish to the song and music.
“Shakespeare Our Contemporary” (1962) is the title of Polish critic Jan Kott’s seminal work, which explores the politics, power dynamics, and desires in Shakespeare’s texts and how these themes resonate in our time. Through this superb interpretation of a play written only two years prior, Pelly and Okisawa aim to make none other than Benjamin Britten our contemporary.
Translated by Ilmari Saarinen
