William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is now, and always has been, a story about horny kids in the woods doing drugs. This may be a reductive description but, let’s face it, many modern Shakespeare adaptations are intentionally reductive. They take The Bard’s eloquent poetry and dramatic complexity and distill them into contemporary lingo, stylistically and/or verbally, in order to underscore the play’s relevance to modern audiences.
The irony, of course, is that by making Shakespeare “modern,” the films end up more dated than the plays. “Romeo and Juliet,” the Shakespeare play, remains as timeless and important as ever.