'LOVE IN IDLENESS' | A review Craig's novel modernizes Shakespeare's comedy

The writer borrowed ideas from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'
By CHARLES MATTHEWS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"Love In Idleness," by Amanda Craig (Talese/Doubleday, $23.95)
If Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets can become Broadway musical Sharks and Jets, and if "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Othello" can be rewritten as movies about American high school students, then why shouldn't novelists rework Shakespeare for themselves?
It paid off for Jane Smiley, who won a Pulitzer Prize when she turned King Lear into an Iowa farmer in "A Thousand Acres." And last year, in "Roscoe," William Kennedy wittily transformed Falstaff and Prince Hal into Albany, N.Y., politicos.
The British writer Amanda Craig has written three previous novels, including last year's critically well-received "In a Dark Wood." For her fourth book, she has plundered "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and come up with a novel about romantic mishaps set at a villa in Tuscany. "Love in Idleness" is no "Thousand Acres" or "Roscoe" -- but then, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" isn't "King Lear" or "Henry IV."
The Shakespeare play is all about romantic mix-ups that take place during the celebration of the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. But in the novel, Craig's equivalents for Theseus and Hippolyta, Theo and Polly Noble, are at the fraying end of their marriage. He's a workaholic attorney, and she's feeling neglected.
Here's the setup
For a vacation getaway, Theo and Polly have rented a Tuscan farmhouse owned by a Hollywood screenwriter (coyly named Bill Shade). Their house guests include Theo's half brother, Daniel, an American who lectures at Oxford University, and his current girlfriend, Ellen von Berg, an American who has made a name for herself in England as a designer of shoes and handbags.
Daniel arrives with a friend of his, Ivo Sponge, a British film critic -- annoying Ellen, who dislikes Ivo. The group also includes Hemani Moulik, a divorced Anglo-Indian physician; she hasn't met Ivo before, and she has "a sinking feeling that Polly was once again trying to set her up with a spare man."
Ellen, Hemani, Daniel and Ivo are obviously Craig's versions of Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander, who become ensnared by the trickery of the fairies in Shakespeare's play.
Craig's equivalents for Shakespeare's fairies are children: Oberon becomes Hemani's son, Bron, and Polly and Theo's children, Tania and Robbie, are the novel's stand-ins for Titania and Puck, or Robin Goodfellow.
Shakespeare's fairies were amazed at what fools mortals could be; the children in Craig's novel are similarly perplexed by adult behavior. And in both cases, incomprehension inspires mischief.
But Craig doesn't slavishly adhere to Shakespeare's plot and characters. The "rude mechanicals" who entertain the nobility with their version of the Pyramus and Thisbe legend are missing from the novel, although Bottom the weaver shows up as Guy Weaver, a TV celebrity with a popular gardening show.
Character links
Guy's braying laugh and hairy ears are the chief links with the Bottom who winds up with an ass's head in the play, but Guy is hardly asinine, and he functions in a denouement that Shakespeare certainly never envisioned.
"Love in Idleness" is pleasantest when Craig relaxes and enjoys her characters and the setting she has put them into. Tuscany seems to have become everyone's favorite getaway spot -- as the publishers acknowledge by eliciting a blurb from the reigning queen of the Tuscanophiles, Frances Mayes.
Craig gets the sense of place just right, not sparing the negatives -- the intense heat and the aggressive insect life that make quaint old houses a trial.
But stuffing a narrative into someone else's framework is risky -- even "A Thousand Acres" sometimes feels cramped by its source. The slapstick running around in the forest that the enchanted lovers do in Shakespeare's play can get silly and tiresome, and the parallel scenes in the novel are sometimes shrill and unfunny.
And in trying to give the children in her book some of the unearthly quality of Shakespeare's fairies, Craig has only made them into irritating brats.
In the end, "Love in Idleness" is mildly enjoyable, inconsequential fluff, a midsummer day's read that will have done its greatest service if it sends you back to the source.