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Over the course of the 1990s, Shakespeare films enjoyed an unprecedented resurgence. Movies such as Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1997) and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream ( 1999) stretched the bounds of Shakespearean cinematic representation, providing structures that revivified the Bard for modern consumption. More recently, Julie Taymor's Titus (2000) and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) have continued the reanimating process: their films present the plays as dystopian reflections upon the anxieties and preoccupations of the late twentieth-century mindset. Now there is a further Shakespearean filmic outing to add to the catalogue-Christine Edzard's The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, which was released in 2001. But rather than mobilizing Shakespeare's play to accommodate the interests of an older generation of spectators, Edzard finds in it specifically childlike concerns. For this is a film performed entirely by children of between eight and twelve years. Not only does such a casting decision represent an event unique in Shakespearean cinematic history; it also enables the director to bring back to our understanding of the dramatist a sense of wonder and invention, qualities that, in adulthood, can sometimes be quickly compromised.
Throughout a distinguished career, Edzard has established herself as a significant voice in the reinterpretation of classic writers. Born in Paris in 1945. Edzard worked with Franco Zeffirelli on his Romeo and Juliet (1968) before founding with Richard Goodwin, in 1975, Sands Films. The studios occupy two vast warehouse spaces in Rotherhithe, South London, and among the productions of the company have been a six-hour film adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1987) and a television feature, The Fool (1989), based on the philanthropic reflections of Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). An exploratory engagement with social malfeasance and urban ills thus animates these early cinematic endeavours, as a culmination to which Edzard directed, in 1992, As You Like It, relocating Shakespeare's pastoral comedy to London's corporate business world and articulating, through images of the blighted docklands, a trenchant condemnation of Thatcher's Britain, For The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, Edzard, and producer Olivier Stockman. have executed a similarly bold, but less obviously social move, since the drama is read in terms of children taking over a Shakespearean performance. As a...