The film premiered in theatres in Europe in September 1968.[1] In the U.S., it was sold directly to television rather than playing in theatres, and premiered as a Sunday evening special, on the night of 9 February 1969. It was shown on CBS (with commercials).[2]
The film was only the second, after Max Reinhardt's 1935 film, sound film adaptation of the play.[3][a] It portrayed the fairies as "wild, near-naked creatures in a primitive, sinister wood."[4] and "the subsidiary fairies were bedraggled child actors; the artisans authentic, almost contemporary rustics."[4] that "contrasted with the sedate courtly milieu of an actual Warwickshire country house."[4] Sukanta Chaudhuri—editor of The Arden Shakespeare, third series edition of the play—describes it as "a notable blending of the traditional with the innovative."[4] Peter Holland, editor of The Oxford Shakespeare edition described it as "[turning] the sentimentality into something rougher and muddier; his fairies, accompanying Titania (Judi Dench), naked with her modesty covered by a long wig, were dirty urchins covered in mud."[5]
Mr Hall's lovers … caper in their mini-skirts and flowered Beatle blouses … around a stately home so sparsely furnished that you feel the removal men are either assembling or dismantling. But stage influences and scaling creep in: half the time … they might as well be running around one small studio-planted coppice, with another daub of mud slapped over their foreheads at the end of each circuit. Make-up seems to present unlikely difficulties: Peaseblossom, Mustard Seed and their confreres … appear startlingly haggard, as though late nights ministering to Titania were taking their toll. The vaguely silvery, vaguely dun-coloured faces of Oberon's flock seem to belong at stage distance; close-up, the fairy kingdom looks like a dusky progressive school suffering from a nasty epidemic of pink-eye.