Cinema: Well Met by Moonlight

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Show-corporation). Presenting Shakespeare with puppets is like playing Beethoven on a kazoo: it sounds awful, but if you can get used to the idea it can be fun. Indeed, when the trick is brought off as brilliantly as it is here, even the Shakespurists may indulge in a delighted suspension of disbelief. Dream was produced in Czechoslovakia by a 49-year-old gimcrack genius named Jiri Trnka (pronounced Trnka). the Walt Disney of the Communist bloc; it is incomparably the best puppet picture ever made, a shimmering translation of poetic fancy into technological fantasy, a planned delirium of light and color for the educated eye, and for literary innocents of whatever age the perfect introduction to Shakespeare.

For the first few minutes, the spectator is inevitably aware of Trnka’s technology. The puppets, flesh of pliable plastic poured on strong steel frames, are marvelously alive but not necessarily human. They are, in fact, inspired refractions of the poet’s entities, born of a fancy quite as wild as Will’s. “Sweet Puck,” for instance, Shakespeare’s “knavish sprite,” is imagined as a sort of naughty Ariel, a boy with the soul of a faun. “Jealous Oberon” is a grand abstraction of stag, noble and serious but indifferent, a thing of dells and vanishings. a silence of eyes, the spirit of the forest watching. And

Huntress Hippolyta looks like a sort of Katharine Hepburn on a Grecian urn. Moreover, the puppets move with amazing fluidity and naturalness—every second of screen time represents 24 changes of position; the complete film, running 74 minutes, required exactly 106,560 moves —through scenes designed with antic charm and persistent style. The spectator soon accepts the intricate artifice and sinks happily into a swoon of poesy and forms, well met by moonlight.

The story and the dialogue, though mildly abridged, are purely Shakespeare’s. Lob and lovers, oafs and ouphes by peradventure meet and mischief in the wold, and afterward convene at court to celebrate the prince’s nuptials with “The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby,” performed by a cast of coxcomical clods.

Alas, this “palpable-gross play,” even with actors from London’s Old Vic Theater to read the roles in the U.S. version, is far less funny in puppetry than it is in person—the soul of the joke, as Shakespeare tells it, is that real live people are making such asses of themselves. But whenever the film depends less on what is said than on what is seen, it is fantastically good. Let an acorn fall from a tree, does it lie there like any natural nut? No, it is an acorn of the mind that spins like a top, turns suddenly into a busy little brownie and goes bustling off into the grass. Let “proud Titania” glide through a glade, does she flutter like any common fairy? No, she is borne on a whispering bejeweled wind of minikin glittering wings.

Truly, in Trnka the play and its poet have found a richly susceptible servitor whose “eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

. . . bodies forth

The forms of things unknown . . .

Tunis them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination . . .”