The Tempest (19 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
On a disc of sun-whitened boards, framed by billows of shifting cloudscape, Nicholas Hytner’s dream-Tempest unfolds. This circle, it seems, is Prospero’s mind’s eye … the characters are the stuff of his dream, to be disposed of as he wishes.
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The disc of an island (designed by David Fielding) is decorated with a single rock which looks disconcertingly like a jacket potato, but apart from this there is little to distract the eye. There is a marvelous sense that the island is decorated only by characters. Each seems a discovery washed up on shore, a curiosity to be inspected or a miracle to be wondered at.
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The technical effects are sparingly and subtly used. The storm is evoked through strobe lighting. Ariel slithers up and down the sides of the proscenium arch and at one point descends in a flurry of angelic feathers. Prospero’s acolytes are as shabbily dressed as their master. There is magic in the air but it is mainly achieved through Jeremy Sams’s music and the rapid tonal shifts to arctic blue in Mark Henderson’s lighting.
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These reviews would seem to suggest that this
Tempest
’s grip on the audience was achieved in no small measure by an
absence
of elaborate scenery, stage furniture, and props. It encouraged the audience to view the stage, as the Elizabethans might have, as a blank space of the imagination on which Prospero can conjure his personal visions.
The design of Sam Mendes’ 1993 production made a blatant statement about the metatheatrical nature of the play. Benedict Nightingale of
The Times
pointed out that “from the word go it is clear that the RSC’s latest
Tempest
will not be tripping with sprites or bursting with pretty vegetation.”
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The play began with a bare boarded stage, in the centre of which was a large property basket. An orange disk of sun lowered from a backdrop. As the house lights dimmed, a white-suited figure, Ariel, emerged deliberately from the basket, closed the lid, then stood on it and raised his hand to start the swing of a lantern
lowered to him from the flies. Prospero was presently seen behind the gauze drop, watching from a ladder. There was no chance of a first-time spectator, unacquainted with the play, mistaking this action for anything but the representation of a fake storm. It established Ariel’s power, a theme that ran through the production up to the climactic moment when, given his freedom by Prospero, he spat in the duke of Milan’s face.
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Critic Michael Billington described how
Mendes and the designer, Anthony Ward, present the play as a series of shifting illusions.… Other characters—such as Caliban and Trinculo, here played as a music-hall ventriloquist complete with recalcitrant doll—are taken out of the prop-basket as required. And Prospero himself is a Victorian dramatist-director writing his own script as he goes along: as he describes the Milanese usurpers to Miranda he conjures them up from behind a cloud-capped screen and when he stages the betrothal masque for the lovers he confronts them with a Pollocks Toy Theater which is then magnified many times in reality. Illusion opens out within illusion as in a series of Chinese boxes.
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In portraying the set of
The Tempest
as a stage itself, an association was created in the audience’s minds linking magician and playwright—Prospero as the auteur, the dramatist of his own world, creating characters and situations that often take on a life of their own and go beyond his control. This approach may give us a glimpse of Shakespeare’s own thoughts about the creative process itself.
The fascination of Prospero is that he’s such an emotional jigsaw puzzle, loveable one minute, hateful the next, then vengeful, then sentimental. His moods change like quicksilver, which is very attractive to an actor.
(Alec McCowen, actor)
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How to reconcile these varying moods and create a balanced performance that has narrative drive is the challenge presented to the
actor. The “refractory elements … that have not yet found complete release”
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—Prospero’s feelings about his enemies, his hold on the island’s magic—can drive the interpretation of the part in different directions: benign fatherly figure, authoritarian avenger, ruthless plotter, disenchanted melancholic. Whatever the choices made by the actor, his interpretation of Prospero will determine the outcome of the production.
To focus on Prospero the magus, or to place the human duke at the centre—or to manage a reconciliation between the two—is one of the major decisions the actor must take. But whatever approach is adopted, the fact that Prospero controls virtually all the play’s action means that it is only through and in him that real dramatic tension can be generated.
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In looking at two of the RSC’s productions we can glean many of the perspectives and ideas that modern interpretations bring to the part. Michael Billington gives an indication of how Derek Jacobi (directed by Ron Daniels, 1982) and John Wood (directed by Nicholas Hytner, 1988) tackled the role:
Instead of the usual benign headmaster dabbling in amateur magic, he offers a ferocious magus who has, in the Freudian manner, imposed his will on natural phenomena.… The tension comes from seeing how and when this Prospero will learn to love; and what is fascinating is that Mr. Jacobi delays until the last second the access of charity … only the sudden, silent appearance of Ariel at his side checks his ungovernable fury and leads to a hard-wrung, “I do forgive thee.” Mr. Jacobi brilliantly offers us a man who has elected to play God and who finds it hard to return to the prosaic trappings of mortality … its success lies in the way it shows Prospero using magic as an instrument of brute force and gradually shedding his divine arrogance.
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The tension and excitement in this production derive principally from John Wood’s intellectually bracing Prospero. Biting irony, precise articulation, and the suggestion of some internal demon are this actor’s strong suits. The real key to the performance
lies in its sense of tormented solitude.… Mr Wood presents us with an instinctive hermit in open-necked shirt and gardening trousers, who has sought refuge in magic and whose visible uneasiness with people shows itself when he is confronted by his enemies. It is a wholly persuasive reading: one that suggests Prospero is a Freudian wreck whose battles are all internal.
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We can see from these reviews that these actors have given two very different performances: Jacobi’s full of “angry drives and vengeful urges,” which are “eventually overcome by a willed adherence to human virtue”;
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Wood’s “wounded rather than an angry man,”
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introverted and distressed, his narrative “a re-run of his agony, a condensation of long-endured grief.”
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Prospero’s relationship to magic is central to these and other performances. When playing Prospero for the BBC, Michael Hordern questioned:
How are we to handle the magic in
The Tempest
? This is one of the great difficulties in presenting the play and in playing Prospero. A Jacobean audience would have been steeped in superstition, magic and the supernatural and so would have been in complete accord with Prospero’s conjuring. Yet no amount of abracadabra, clever lighting effects and crystal balls is going to carry a modern audience to the suspension of disbelief.
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With magic no longer a reality to a modern audience, it has to be presented in a way that is believable for them. Costuming plays an important part in signifying the nature of the magician and his power. While conjuring, Jacobi’s elaborate magical cloak took the form of a priestly vestment, with cabalistic, astrological, and alchemical symbols. The significance of this cloak was demonstrated by the fact that it filled a full page in the program—the first image of Prospero seen before the performance began. The program also contained extensive notes on “ritual magic.” Prospero as all-powerful magus was clearly central to this production.
An inner emotional “tempest” has brought a reality, a humanizing
influence on recent performances. Jacobi’s Prospero waged a continual psychological battle in which he consciously had to will himself back into a human frame of mind, as if dark forces temporarily possessed him. For Jacobi’s Prospero the removal of the cloak physically dramatized an end to magical influence. His humanity was visually signified by a tattered costume—an old, worn dressing gown, ordinary shirt and trousers. Markedly younger than previous Prosperos, Jacobi commented:
I am sure he is not old in body. I think he has grown old in his mind. His researchings into magic and his workings with the elements have made his brain old … it has almost burned him out.
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Conversely, when in the grips of a spell he became revitalized. In his performance there was an obvious element of addiction to power, and a sexual potency in the power of magic that took a monumental effort for him to relinquish.
The trend of having younger actors portray the role carried on into the next RSC production in 1988. Although of an age with Jacobi, John Wood’s Prospero was physically very different. He was costumed in a modern “open-necked shirt and baggy, unpressed flannels.”
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A long, plain dressing gown served as his magic cloak, and a tall, thin wooden stick, which was often planted upright in the center of the stage, served as his staff. Unlike Jacobi, he had none of the elaborate traditional trappings of the magus. The basic nature of his costume indicated his vulnerability to external influences, both supernatural and human.
Wood’s mode of verse speaking indicated that the uncanny, otherworldly influence of magical chants and Ariel’s songs had infiltrated his normal language and conversations. Through his intellectual isolation and absorption in magic he had unwittingly allowed a mental corruption to take place. Whereas Jacobi had the willpower to separate himself from the magic by a massive effort, one got the feeling that magic had seeped into the soul of Wood’s Prospero.
3.
Derek Jacobi as a Prospero in stern control of Miranda’s betrothal to Ferdinand, with Michael Maloney and Alice Krige as the lovers, in Ron Daniels’ 1982 RSC production.
In these productions Prospero’s motivation was also markedly different. This was clearly demonstrated in his relationship with Miranda. Closeness between father and daughter was established very early on in the 1988 production:
In the scene where he relates to Miranda the tale of the overthrow of his Dukedom, Wood vacillates between tearful, frustrated anger … and a touching need for emotional reassurance from his daughter.
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This Prospero was not only very affectionate to Miranda, but also relied on her to keep him emotionally grounded. His magical plot was orchestrated entirely for his daughter’s future happiness:
More maternal than fatherly this is a Prospero who practices not a “rough magic” but a gentle magic … when Prospero claims that all he has done is motivated by care for Miranda it is convincing.
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Jacobi, on the other hand, was quick to anger with his Miranda. Like a bad-tempered father he tolerated her interruptions, but ultimately she was a distraction from his magic. “He is a man who has clearly been deposed in his prime and is willing every demon in nature to extract his revenge.”
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Many reviewers felt he sailed close to losing the underlying humanity of the character: “His wrath is so turbulent that we can never believe that he is as genuine in those moments of compassion which show us the other side of Prospero.”
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By the end of the play, this Prospero’s overarching motive was to reestablish himself in the Dukedom of Milan. John Wood, in the later production, by contrast, offered the very antithesis of this:
Facing the Neapolitan court, Wood is almost unendurably pathetic.… With his book buried, Prospero has once more become a failed elder statesman, who may be permitted to return from exile because he no longer poses a threat. Awoken from the dream, the fantasy evaporating,
The Tempest
is proven to be Prospero’s tragedy.
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The role of Prospero remains one of the great challenges for major actors. Having played the part in America many years before, Patrick Stewart returned to it for the RSC in 2006, and in so doing proved that television and movie work (and fame) does not necessarily ruin an actor’s ability to perform in the theater. His appearance was described as reminiscent of “some kind of shabby Lapland shaman, clad in a bearskin cloak and reindeer-skull headdress, raising the spirits from a burning brazier.”
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His performance imbued the part with depth and humanity:
Stewart proceeds to give a fine performance. True, you feel he’s fibbing when he says that as duke of Milan he preferred books to politics, but he catches what really matters. Here’s a Prospero with fierce feelings—doting father, bullying slave-master, proud magus, angry avenger—and the power to exercise them absolutely. Yet in the end he sacrifices control, accepts his own humanity, renounces revenge and, despite having captured the men who exiled him, forgives them.
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