A Midsummer Night's (Different) Dream(s): The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1972 Tour of Eastern Europe

Sitting between the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and a Vice-President of the Council of State for Cultural and Socialist Education in the official box at the Opera House for the gala premiere of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream on 23 October and watching those adroit fairies prepare Bottom for his night of love with Titania, I began to get an uneasy feeling that things were not going well as I observed their consternation and embarrassment at the erotic miming before us. This impression was confirmed by their almost monosyllabic comments at my reception during the interval. Tres interessant said Gliga, but then words failed him; tres piquant said [Ion] Blada more apposite comment on the scene than perhaps intended, but even this faint praise clearly left other thoughts unexpressed. . . . However, on the following day my Cultural Attache and later the manager of the Company were called to a 2 1/2-hour meeting with ARIA, the Romanian State impresarios, to hear their suggestions for the modification of the Phallic Bottom episode; but the manager insisted that he had no power to alter Peter Brook's masterpiece in any way at all and this particular scene in fact remained unaltered during the remainder of the run. On 31 October 1972, Derick Rosslyn Ashe, the British ambassador to Romania, sent this strictly confidential report to J. L. Bullard, the head of the East European and Soviet Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. His report was written a few days after the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) had completed its tour in Romania, which took place from 22 to 28 October 1972. Although Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had originally premiered on 27 August 1970 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Council chose it for a tour of Eastern Europe in 1972, and the company played it in Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, and Warsaw.