The Dream (ballet)
| The Dream | |
|---|---|
| Choreographer | Frederick Ashton |
| Music | Felix Mendelssohn |
| Based on | A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| Premiere | 2 April 1964 Royal Opera House, London |
| Original ballet company | The Royal Ballet |
| Design | Henry Bardon and David Walker |
| Setting | Ancient Greece |
| Type | classical ballet |
The Dream is a one-act ballet adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with choreography by Frederick Ashton to music by Mendelssohn arranged by John Lanchbery. It was premiered by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 2 April 1964 in a triple bill with Kenneth MacMillan's Images of Love and Robert Helpmann's Hamlet.
The ballet was presented to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. Ashton drastically trimmed Shakespeare's plot, discarding Theseus and Hippolyta and the play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe. The focus of the ballet is on the fairies and the four lovers from Athens lost in the wood. Lanchbery adapted the overture and incidental music Mendelssohn had written for the play in 1826 and 1842. Ashton and his designers, Henry Bardon and David Walker, set the action in or about the 1840s.
Four young Athenians, Hermia and Lysander and Helena and Demetrius, are in romantic turmoil. Hermia loves Lysander but her father insists that she must marry Demetrius. The latter has switched his love from Helena to Hermia; Hermia is unmoved and Helena is distraught. Hermia and Lysander escape from Athens, with Demetrius pursuing them, and himself pursued by Helena.
In the forest outside Athens Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen, Titania, have quarrelled because she refuses to give him her Indian changeling boy as an attendant. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's defiance; he sends his servant, the mischievous fairy Puck, to find a flower called "love-in-idleness". The juice from this flower, if squeezed on a sleeping person's eyelids, makes the victim fall in love with the first living thing seen on awakening. Oberon intends to humiliate Titania by making her fall in love with some monster of the forest.
Into the forest come a group of workmen, the "rude mechanicals". One of them, Nick Bottom, is isolated from his colleagues, and Puck casts a spell to give him the head of a donkey. Oberon squeezes the flower on the eyelids of the sleeping Titania, who, on waking, sees the transformed Bottom and falls madly for him.
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