Yang Jung-ung's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", staged by the theater company Traveler, drew acclaim both in Korea and abroad, with performances in Britain, across Europe and China.TRAVELER THEATER COMPANY
Kim Myung-hwa
The author is a playwright and director.
Summer has reached its peak. The towering cumulus clouds that return after the monsoon are a welcome sight, yet the long stretch of heat leaves it difficult to focus on work. There is something about the summer sun that unsettles the mind. In Albert Camus's "The Stranger" (1942), a gun is drawn on a sun-drenched beach. In Henry Miller's "The Colossus of Maroussi" (1941), the dazzling light is so intoxicating that one feels capable of leaping from a cliff into the open sky. Summer sunlight carries a strange madness, one that dulls reason and loosens the grip of ordinary judgment.
The theater, too, has long embraced summer as more than a backdrop. In the plays of Tennessee Williams, including "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), the season is almost always the humid, suffocating summer of the American South, where desire grows sticky and unbearable before finally exploding. In Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1956), summer is wrapped in thick fog, obscuring both the landscape and the future. In the works of Anton Chekhov, meanwhile, it becomes the season of boredom, inertia and lives that seem unable to move forward.
Yet no dramatic work represents summer more vividly than William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (c. 1595–1596). Young lovers flee into the forest to escape the authority of both ruler and father. Like its title, where night and dream overlap, the play presents summer as a season layered with conflicting meanings. It is the time of year when desire is least willing to disguise itself, when fairies and fantasies hidden from the daylight begin to roam freely and when chaos itself becomes fertile ground for creation.
Its most unforgettable scenes unfold in the forest after dark. Once the human lovers stray into the fairy kingdom, confusion quickly overflows. A mischievous fairy mistakenly applies the juice of a magical flower, causing the lovers to lose sight of whom they truly love. At the same time, the fairy queen falls helplessly in love with a man transformed into a donkey. Affection, identity and reason all dissolve beneath the spell of a midsummer night.
When morning finally comes and Duke Theseus hears the extraordinary tale, he grants the young lovers permission to marry and leaves behind his famous meditation on "the lunatic, the lover and the poet." Such people possess imagination and passion that reason alone cannot explain. They perceive worlds invisible to ordinary eyes, step outside familiar orbits and give shape to things that do not yet exist. The creative force that dares to imagine the impossible belongs to every season, but it finds its truest home in summer.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
