The play opens in an apparently uninhabited wood.  Suddenly all comes to life—­gay, full, romantic life.  This is the scene to which we are transported.  “It is a grave question,” continues the reviewer, “if it is possible for the average audience to attain the full illusion which the play demands, and with which, in reading, we have no difficulty.  One thing is certain, the audience was under no illusion.  Some, those who do not pretend to learning or taste, wondered what it was all about.  Only when the lion moved his tail, or the ass wriggled his ears were they at all interested.  Others were frankly amused from first to last, no less at Hermia’s and Helen’s quarrel than at the antics of the clowns.  Still others, the cultivated minority, were simply indifferent.”

The truth is that the performance was stiff and cold.  Not for an instant did it suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the background of the play.  Nor is this strange. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre.  Individual scenes were well done, but the whole was a cheerless piece of business.

The next day the same writer continues his analysis.  He points out that the secret of the play is the curious interweaving of the real world with the supernatural.  Forget this but for a moment, and the piece becomes an impossible monstrosity without motivation or meaning.  Shakespeare preserves this unity in duality.  The two worlds seem to meet and fuse, each giving something of itself to the other.  But this unity was absent from the performance.  The actors did not even know their lines, and thus the spell was broken.  The verse must flow from the lips in a limpid stream, especially in a fairy play; the words must never seem a burden.  But even this elementary rule was ignored in our performance.  And the ballet of the fairies was so bad that it might better have been omitted.  Puck should not have been given by a woman, but by a boy as he was in Shakespeare’s day.  Only the clown scenes were unqualifiedly good, “as we might expect,” concludes the reviewer sarcastically.

The article closes with a parting shot at the costuming and the scenery.  Not a little of it was inherited from “Orpheus in the Lower World.”  Are we so poor as that?  Better wait, and for the present, give something which demands less of the theatre.  The critic grants that the presentation may prove profitable but, on the whole, Bjornson must feel that he has assisted at the mutilation of a master.

Bjornson did not permit this attack to go unchallenged.  He was not the man to suffer in silence, and in this case he could not be silent.  His directorate was an experiment, and there were those in Christiania who were determined to make it unsuccessful.  It was his duty to set malicious criticism right.  He did so in Aftenbladet[10] in an article which not only answered a bit of ephemeral criticism but which remains to this day an almost perfect example of Bjornson’s polemical prose—­fresh, vigorous, genuinely eloquent, with a marvelous fusing of power and fancy.