Authors: William Shakespeare
The Tempest (18 page)
2.
The play as magical spectacle, with elaborate design and Ariel center-stage as harpy above the “three men of sin”: Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951, directed by Michael Benthall and designed by Loudon Sainthill.
Peter Hall at the National Theater in 1974 saw the play “in terms of the Jacobean court masque and his staging was dominated by equivalents of the theatrical techniques which Inigo Jones introduced into England.”
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Prospero took on the role of stage manager. Four years
later Giorgio Strehler directed a spectacular Italian version with the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, Italy’s most celebrated and long-established repertory company. His production lasted for four hours and was widely acclaimed for its “overwhelming theatrical force and seriousness of purpose.”
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The central focus was on Prospero and Ariel, converting “their relationship into a metaphor for the interaction of director and actor” with spectacle the keynote:
Strehler’s production opened with a spectacular storm lasting fifteen minutes. Behind a huge transparent canvas an open-sailed ship was visible. Sailors clambered up the ropes; the rigging collapsed; the mast split. Throughout this scene vast blue waves billowed and rolled round the stage, created by huge lengths of blue silk—five thousand square yards of it—operated by sixteen unseen operators hidden under the stage, which was divided into three corridors with their floor shaped into mounds and hollows. Musicians beat drums, stage hands operated thunder sheets, and technicians provided bursts of lightning. It was in two senses a “direful
spectacle
”: terrifying but at the same time clearly the product of theatrical artifice. Finally the waves retreated as the strips of silk were drawn back to reveal a simple wooden raft which represented the island.
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George C. Wolfe’s 1994–95 New York Shakespeare Festival production likewise employed spectacular staging effects, described here by Robert Brustein:
Bunraku puppets, Indonesian shadow play, Caribbean carnivals, Macy’s Day floats, Asian stilt-walkers, death masks, stick dancing, magical transformations effected through a haze of smokepots. Don’t look to spend any quiet time here. The stage is in constant motion. This may be the busiest
Tempest
in history.
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If Prospero was traditionally seen as a benign omniscient father-figure, Miranda had been regarded as the perfect daughter. In the
light of feminist thinking, Prospero’s treatment of his daughter and his plans for her future have been seen as an unwholesome desire for patriarchal control. Miranda’s problematic position in colonial discourse has been discussed to the point that the Shakespeare scholar Ann Thompson has posed the question, “What kind of pleasure can a woman and a feminist take in this text beyond the rather grim one of mapping its various patterns of exploitation?”
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The relationship between father and daughter has accordingly undergone a variety of representations and the lines restored which previous ages thought impossible for Miranda to utter, “Abhorrèd slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take, / Being capable of all ill” (1.2.411–413).
Productions of
The Tempest
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have explored many possibilities, adapting it to a variety of styles, ideological inflections and locales, playing on its supreme flexibility; Jonathan Kent’s 2001 watery Almeida Theater production was set on an island littoral and in the same year the role of Prospero was played by a woman, Vanessa Redgrave, at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Tempest
has been all things to all those concerned with the nature of theater. It has also proved an inspiration in the cinema, from a brief early silent version of 1908 to the 1956 sci-fi adaptation directed by Fred Wilcox,
The Forbidden Planet
(itself the inspiration for the 1989 camp sci-fi rock and roll musical,
Return to the Forbidden Planet
) to Derek Jarman’s 1979 film
The Tempest
, a compelling, dreamlike personal vision, shot in the decaying gothic mansion Stoneleigh Abbey, to Paul Mazursky’s 1982 banal urban update (
Tempest
), and finally Peter Greenaway’s visually spectacular re-imagining of the play to produce a meditation on the power of art culminating in book number 24, a folio volume of 1623, consisting of thirty-six plays,
Prospero
’s
Books
.
The Tempest …
distils the poetic essence of the whole Shakespearean universe.
(Program notes to 1963 RSC production, quoting G. Wilson Knight, 1932)
Freedom and oppression, obedience and rebellion, and the corruption of power in both personal and political life are housed in this most mysterious of Shakespeare’s “comedies.” Ideas of kingship, fatherhood, authority, and love inform the three divergent plot lines, coming together in a final scene of revelation and reconciliation.
The Tempest
offers us a world in which its characters operate free from society’s constraints—but what type of world is it, and what is the nature of the characters that inhabit it? As Anne Barton pointed out in the program notes to John Barton’s 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “To perform it in the theater, even to try and talk about it, is inevitably to add to its substance by filling in gaps and silences left deliberately by the dramatist.” Peter Brook, who directed the play for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957, and codirected it in 1963 for the RSC with Clifford Williams, discussed the difficult nature of coming to grips with Shakespeare’s most elusive of plays:
When we see how nothing in the play is what it seems, how it takes place on an island and not on an island, during a day and not during a day, with a tempest that sets off a series of events that are still within a tempest even when the storm is done, that the charming pastoral for children naturally encompasses rape, murder, conspiracy and violence; when we begin to unearth the themes that Shakespeare so carefully buried, we see that it is his final statement, and that it deals with the whole condition of man.
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A play of infinite possibilities, notoriously difficult to stage effectively,
The Tempest
offers a multitude of choices for its director and a conundrum for actors seeking to build dimension from Shakespeare’s enigmatic characterizations. Shakespeare scholar Christine Dymkowski outlines some of the play’s dualities:
It seems unusually elastic, its almost miraculous flexibility allowing it to embody radically different interpretations, characterisations and emphases. Prospero and Caliban can not only exchange places as hero and villain, but also vie with each other to occupy both places at once. Ariel can be female or male, a willing or an unwilling servant. Miranda can seem an innocent maiden, a hoydenish tomboy or a rebellious teenager. Antonio can seek forgiveness from his brother or remain sinister until the end. Stephano and Trinculo can present themselves as harmless buffoons or dangerous louts. The island can appear a lush paradise or a barren desert or both at once. The narrative can speak for or against racism or turn into a psychological thriller. The play’s final effect can be one of decay and despair or renewal and hope.
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All interpreters of the play, whether directors in the rehearsal room or critics in the study, have to address difficult questions about the portrayal of Prospero, the nature of his “rough magic,” and how he interacts with the other characters, most importantly Ariel and Caliban.
In the theater or on-screen, a key interpretive choice for director and designer is the representation of the setting in which the action takes place: the island that is the location for the entire action after the initial shipboard storm. The play is readily transportable to different settings and periods. The island’s imprecise location makes it a place of the imagination; perhaps more than any other Shakespearean location, it is open to multitudinous interpretations.
The Tempest
has been set in all the continents of the world, and even in outer space.
Modern directors have moved away from the nineteenth-century taste for spectacular stage pictures, and considered alternative means of depicting the island’s magical environment. So, for instance, Rupert Goold’s 2006 RSC production achieved many notable effects, not least through its surprising setting:
The shipwrecked nobles have washed up in the Arctic or some more metaphoric, spiritually desolate realm … during the
storm, grey waves crash on a huge projection scrim, a radar dial transforms into a porthole-cum-magic circle through which we spy below-decks, then a black screen whirls with white flecks as if charting a tornado or brainwave interference. It’s a startling vision, as is the panorama of jagged ice that comprises Prospero’s isle and evokes Caspar David Friedrich’s bleak painting,
The Wreck of the Hope
.
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Just over forty years before, the designer for the RSC’s 1963 production, Abd’Elkader Farrah, created an abstract world of “strange suns and moons, space-creatures who act as Ariel’s assistants; trapdoors by the dozen, ever-opening to emit some fresh wonder, or walls that fall, crashing, at a wave of Prospero’s wand.”
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He believed that elaborate settings were no longer appropriate in the cinematic age: “I could have conjured up a romantic sea-storm: wind, rain, ship cracking, and so on. It would have made a big impact. But the cinema does such things better.”
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The director of this production, Clifford Williams, also stated: “The play is termed a romance, but you can’t present a romance in romantic terms—the baroque, the rococo; we don’t respond to them any more.”
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Although this 1963 production was referred to as gimmicky and failed to impress an unprepared theatrical world, it marked a sea change in the way directors thought about the play and how the RSC designed its productions. The company’s next three productions also worked with pared-down abstract sets, and it was not until 1982, almost twenty years later, that a more elaborate design returned to the main stage at Stratford-upon-Avon. Abstract settings encouraged a more cerebral reading of the play, prompting us to think of the play’s characters as being metaphorical, aspects of Prospero’s mind, whereas designs that created a more formulated environment often threw the focus of the play on more external issues such as kingship, inheritance, revenge, treachery, and colonialism.
The stage design alone can often indicate what type of interpretation we are about to experience. Directors today have the visual freedom of expression to conduct an examination of many of the things that the play makes us ponder: the corrupting influence of power and revenge, the complexity of Prospero’s mind, or the use of the play as a
means of looking at the very nature of theater itself. The following three RSC productions (1982, 1988 and 1993) took on these different challenges in imaginative ways. The skeletal shape of the wreck of Prospero’s ship dominated the set for the 1982 Ron Daniels production:
In the opening storm scene, a boat’s prow pushes out toward the audience while the beleaguered crew do valiant battle with the sound effects. A large black sail billows in the wind. Prospero’s island is then revealed as a broken ship of state, with a severely crushed foredeck, leaning mast with crow’s nest, and tattered sails.… This is a strong visual conception that underlines the political upheavals back home in Milan and establishes Prospero as an exiled magician rather than an eccentric conjurer. The masques and apparitions are produced from behind the ship’s defunct main sail: Caliban enters from below deck through a trapdoor, and Ariel and his fellow sprites nip speedily about the boat like willing versatile cabin boys.
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Ned Chaillet of
The Times
described it as a production of:
All glitter and light, all colour and hooped skirts with collars of shining wire and air. The beastly terrors invoked and unleashed on the conspiracy of fools led by Caliban are misshapen demons with glowing eyes, preceded by the baying skeletons of dogs.
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The “hyper realistic wreck”
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of the ship housed the characters and confined the action of the play within its limits. This was Prospero’s ship and his magic emanated from the core of a corrupted vessel. The nature of his magic was morally ambiguous, and the set indicated a corruption in both the man and the state of Milan, which he once represented. As Michael Billington said in his review, this production never let the spectator forget that “this is a play about power” and about the “internal struggle between Prospero’s own omnipotence and humanity.”
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In order to emphasize a more cerebral reading of the play, the 1988 RSC production, directed by Nicholas Hytner, returned to the use of a
pared-down set. A white, shaped disc on which the action took place successfully symbolized the magic island and Prospero’s mind: