1970, Robert Speaight (1904—76) on Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), PP-448—9

Abstract

Abstract It was eight years since Mr. Brook had directed a play at Stratford, and one assumed that he would not have directed the Dream unless he had something very particular to say about it. In fact, he forced one to forget—not, let me emphasize, the play itself—but anything one had seen done with it, or imagined being done with it, in the theatre. He swept the mind of the spectator as clear as he had swept his stage, allowing the text of the play, beautifully and deliberately spoken, to play upon you with the freshness of words seen for the first time upon the printed page. He persuaded you to forget a century of theatrical tradition, with its conventions and its cliches; and commanded you into a frame of mind where the very notion of magic, of supernatural agency, had to be created afresh. You could, if you chose, harbour a reminiscence of Alice in Wonderland* but of nothing else.