关于《仲夏夜之梦》的编导概念:

改编名著剧本是非常艰辛的一件事，何况那还是莎士比亚的剧本。当我必需履行这次的计划时，我真的觉得压力无比的大，或许对我来说，是还没有充裕的时间做心理准备吧。当一切敲定落实后，你唯有卯足劲去做。我开始从新游走在莎翁的文字里头，尝试去解读和了解关于《仲夏夜之梦》这样的一个故事，上网找资料等。然后我开始用自己的一个想法去看这个故事。我应该注入什么新的元素和想法呢？我又应该保留什么东西呢？

最终，回到原点，我还是觉得作为一个参与这个S24计划的其中一个表演团体，很多东西还是必需回归在整个计划的目的与意义。所以在创作的当儿，我一直为之困惑，我必需从什么角度去切入和改编呢？当然我也可以选择完全跟着原著把整个故事表演出来。但是，作为一个创作者的私欲，我仍然想把自己的看法和观点加入，但又想让更多的年轻人去欣赏莎翁剧本里头的诗意和文学性。于是，或许我已经找到一个基本的创作概念，既是把原著的基本架构取下，然后我再覆盖一个我想呈现的手法和故事，引用其中的几个人物让《仲夏夜之梦》再发生一次。当然我还会把原著剧本中那充满诗意和文学性的对白巧妙的穿插其中，希望借用这样的创作理念把自己想尝试的放进去同时也保留了原著的精髓。

当然不管是编和导的部分我其实企图加入一些讯息，由故事的主人翁去说出，环绕的依然是爱情这一个大主题。然而，整个改编的故事同样以轻松的基调去进行，也如原著版是平民化，通俗和商业化的，是充满着谐谑、欢乐又不媚俗的一部喜剧。
“每个爱情都应该被祝福的…”我如此觉得《仲夏夜之梦》深具意义。

造心厂《仲夏夜之梦》导演：曾福明

Get 2 know - William Shakespeare's Play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Part V)

Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Love Potion
The love potion is made from the juice of a flower that was struck with one of Cupid’s misfired arrows; it is used by the fairies to wreak romantic havoc throughout Acts II, III, and IV. Because the meddling fairies are careless with the love potion, the situation of the young Athenian lovers becomes increasingly chaotic and confusing (Demetrius and Lysander are magically compelled to transfer their love from Hermia to Helena), and Titania is hilariously humiliated (she is magically compelled to fall deeply in love with the ass-headed Bottom). The love potion thus becomes a symbol of the unreasoning, fickle, erratic, and undeniably powerful nature of love, which can lead to inexplicable and bizarre behavior and cannot be resisted.

Puck
Though there is little character development in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and no true protagonist, critics generally point to Puck as the most important character in the play. The mischievous, quick-witted sprite sets many of the play’s events in motion with his magic, by means of both deliberate pranks on the human characters (transforming Bottom’s head into that of an ass) and unfortunate mistakes (smearing the love potion on Lysander’s eyelids instead of Demetrius’s).

More important, Puck’s capricious spirit, magical fancy, fun-loving humor, and lovely, evocative language permeate the atmosphere of the play. As Oberon’s jester, he is given to a certain coarseness, which leads him to transform Bottom’s head into that of an ass merely for the sake of enjoyment. He is good-hearted but capable of cruel tricks.

Nick Bottom
Whereas Puck’s humor is often mischievous and subtle, the comedy surrounding the overconfident weaver Nick Bottom is hilariously overt. The central figure in the subplot involving the craftsmen’s production of the Pyramus and Thisbe story, Bottom dominates his fellow actors with an extraordinary belief in his own abilities (he thinks he is perfect for every part in the play) and his comical incompetence (he is a terrible actor and frequently makes rhetorical and grammatical mistakes in his speech). The humor surrounding Bottom often stems from the fact that he is totally unaware of his own ridiculousness; his speeches are overdramatic and self-aggrandizing, and he seems to believe that everyone takes him as seriously as he does himself. This foolish self-importance reaches its pinnacle after Puck transforms Bottom’s head into that of an ass. When Titania, whose eyes have been anointed with a love potion, falls in love with the now ass-headed Bottom, he believes that the devotion of the beautiful, magical fairy queen is nothing out of the ordinary and that all of the trappings of her affection, including having servants attend him, are his proper due. His unawareness of the fact that his head has been transformed into that of an ass parallels his inability to perceive the absurdity of the idea that Titania could fall in love with him.

Helena
Although Puck and Bottom stand out as the most personable characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they themselves are not involved in the main dramatic events. Of the other characters, Helena, the lovesick young woman desperately in love with Demetrius, is perhaps the most fully drawn. Among the quartet of Athenian lovers, Helena is the one who thinks most about the nature of love—which makes sense, given that at the beginning of the play she is left out of the love triangle involving Lysander, Hermia, and Demetrius. She says, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” believing that Demetrius has built up a fantastic notion of Hermia’s beauty that prevents him from recognizing Helena’s own beauty (I.ii.134). Utterly faithful to Demetrius despite her recognition of his shortcomings, Helena sets out to win his love by telling him about the plan of Lysander and Hermia to elope into the forest. Once Helena enters the forest, many of her traits are drawn out by the confusion that the love potion engenders: compared to the other lovers, she is extremely unsure of herself, worrying about her appearance and believing that Lysander is mocking her when he declares his love for her.

Get 2 Know - William Shakespeare's Play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (part IV)

Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Contrast
The idea of contrast is the basic building block of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The entire play is constructed around groups of opposites and doubles. Nearly every characteristic presented in the play has an opposite: Helena is tall, Hermia is short; Puck plays pranks, Bottom is the victim of pranks; Titania is beautiful, Bottom is grotesque.
Further, the three main groups of characters (who are developed from sources as varied as Greek mythology, English folklore, and classical literature) are designed to contrast powerfully with one another: the fairies are graceful and magical, while the craftsmen are clumsy and earthy; the craftsmen are merry, while the lovers are overly serious.
Contrast serves as the defining visual characteristic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the play’s most indelible image being that of the beautiful, delicate Titania weaving flowers into the hair of the ass-headed Bottom. It seems impossible to imagine two figures less compatible with each other. The juxtaposition of extraordinary differences is the most important characteristic of the play’s surreal atmosphere and is thus perhaps the play’s central motif; there is no scene in which extraordinary contrast is not present.

Get 2 Know - William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (Part III)

Dreams

As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; they are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest.

Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the fairies in the magical forest.

At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should remember it as nothing more than a dream. This sense of illusion and gauzy fragility is crucial to the atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as it helps render the play a fantastical experience rather than a heavy drama.

GET 2 KNOW - William Shakespeare's Play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (Part II)

Magic
The fairies’ magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos, as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysander’s eyelids, magic ultimately resolves the play’s tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he reshapes Bottom’s head into that of an ass and recreates the voices of Lysander and Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmen’s attempt to stage their play.

GET 2 KNOW - William Shakespeare's play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (part I)

Let's taik about the 'Themes, Symbols, & Motifs'

(抱歉，找不到中文译本）

Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Love’s Difficulty
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander, articulating one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s most important themes—that of the difficulty of love (I.i.134). Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and afflictions that those in love suffer. The tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience never doubts that things will end happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without being caught up in the tension of an uncertain outcome.

The theme of love’s difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balance—that is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a relationship. The prime instance of this imbalance is the asymmetrical love among the four young Athenians: Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius, and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helena—a simple numeric imbalance in which two men love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few. The play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways based on a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers’ tangle resolves itself into symmetrical pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberon’s coveting of Titania’s Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titania’s passion for the ass-headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque.

to be continue...