The Tempest (21 page)

The storm came out of the central conceit of the production, which is that Prospero had been washed up on the island with certain objects and they resided on his makeshift, driftwood desk throughout the production. There was a book that opened up into a Pollock’s toy theater, there was a vase of flowers, there was a small skip with his clothes, and out of those simple objects emerged all the magic and the poetry of the play. When the Lords, Gonzalo, Antonio, etc. arrived on the island for the first time they were surrounded by the flowers; to create the masque Ariel (played by Simon Russell Beale), opened the small Pollock’s toy theater book and a fully grown Pollock’s toy theater emerged out of the ground. Caliban’s cave was Prospero’s skip, and so on. So everything had a root in Prospero’s belongings and the storm was no different.

The storm was created out of a skip and a swinging lantern. We began on an empty stage and the first image that you saw was Ariel walking up onto stage and swinging the lantern, and the moment the lantern went into motion the sailors exploded out of the skip and the stage became the boat. It was a deliberately theatrical conceit and at no point, like the rest of the production, attempted to convey the sense that the island was real. The island was a state of mind, a space in which Prospero could conduct his human experiment, his fantasy of revenge. There were photos in the program of a variety of mad film directors, from Orson Welles to David Lean, who had tried to govern the natural world, to impose their will on it. That was our vision of Prospero.

Goold:
My starting point was in trying to convey the helpless fear one feels as a passenger when a storm hits—after all, most of the characters who speak in the scene are not mariners. Initially I intended to stage the scene on a plane during a crash as I expect most modern audiences will have more vivid and unsettling experiences of air travel than sea now. However, I worried that we would suffer in
comparison to the TV series
Lost
(itself inspired by
The Tempest
) and so we stayed on a boat.

As a child I remember being on cross-channel ferries and feeling very vulnerable and it struck me that the experience below deck is more frightening than above. Perhaps our collective fear of burial alive has been stoked by submarine films but certainly that seemed an unusual focus. So Giles Cadle (our designer) and I tried to create a very claustrophobic navigation cell below deck into which the lords and mariners would pitch and panic. The idea of that cell being set in a radio came from my interest in opening with the shipping forecast and a rather weak pun on the word Ariel!

Perhaps what animated the sequence most in the end, though, were our queasy monumental projections of the pitching sea that accompanied the sequence.

There is an unusually long exposition in Act 1 Scene 2, in which Prospero, as “schoolmaster,” narrates past events to Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. On one occasion, Miranda appears to be falling asleep—how did you avoid the risk that some audience members might join her?

Brook:
It’s only if the storm is too spectacular that Prospero’s tale becomes a bore. Yet when Gielgud played it—or on another occasion I saw Paul Scofield in the same role—it couldn’t occur to anyone in the audience, nor even to the actors themselves, that this extraordinary narrative could be less than fascinating. But as Miranda has been brought up in an exotic dream, she has no living associations to connect to in this tale from another reality.

Mendes:
It’s called good acting! But I also gave Alec McCowen (who played Prospero) a little help: the people that he described walked on stage as he told his story. They emerged from behind a tiny screen, which was one of the other things that had been washed up on the island with him. It was used throughout the production to conjure up people center-stage. The actors didn’t make entrances and exits from the wings; they tended to emerge from behind objects—in this case, from behind the screen stepped all the people that Prospero was talking about, from Antonio to Gonzalo, so we animated his story a little.

I think that Shakespeare begins the play with a very simple story quite deliberately. A good actor will make an audience feel like they’re sitting at his feet, very much like Miranda is, and will be as gripped by the story as she appears to be. Your reading of it is that she seems to be falling asleep. But I think Prospero is distracted—when he says “[Dost] thou hear,” I think he is so wrapped up in his memories that he gradually becomes less and less aware of her as an audience. I don’t think he’s scrutinizing her for responses all the time. I think that having not talked about it for twelve years, he reopens old wounds, and is now plunged right back into the events themselves. I think that’s the sort of thing that Shakespeare was after.

Goold:
I always wanted to not “stage” the scene around Prospero and Miranda as some productions do, because unless you focus on Prospero’s relationship to the story we never really get let in on him as a character. The idea we worked with was that although Prospero knew that the day of the play lay under “an auspicious star,” perhaps he didn’t know what was going to be auspicious about it. Patrick [Stewart, who played Prospero] liked the idea that Prospero had been standing on the cliffs and seen the Neapolitan boat and, in that moment, decided to raise the storm. So he began the scene in a state of great agitation and shock and this gave it a useful urgency. I also think there are a lot of laughs in the scene if played properly, both in the text—Miranda’s interjections mostly—but also in the relationship: the cranky old father/teacher and his trusting pupil. The laughs and the rage, from both characters, shape the scene and prevent one long serene narration.

Neither Ariel nor Caliban is conventionally human: what particular challenges does the presence of such parts create for the director and the actor?

Brook:
In the Bouffes production, which was our most developed version after many years of trials and errors, I tried to avoid the clichés of a lighter-than-air dancer like Ariel. Instead we had an African actor, Bakary Sangaré, with the physique of a rugby player, but with such a lightness of spirit, wit, and fantasy that he suggested Arielness more than any illustration could do. It was the same principle
that had once led to acrobatics and dexterity for fairies in the
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
. With Caliban again we tried to avoid illustration—he was played by David Bennent, the same actor who had been the violent child in the film of Gunther Grass’
Tin Drum
. He suggested all the fury and rebellion of an adolescent in his relationship with the tyrannical adult who had power over him.

Mendes:
Fun challenges! That’s the joy of doing the play, how you render the other worlds that Prospero is attempting to control: the spiritual, the world of the air, and the earth. How do you render “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”? To me, that’s one of the chief interpretative decisions that you have to make. How do you treat those figures? Do you treat them, as Peter Brook did, as totally and unexpectedly opposite figures, or, as Jonathan Miller has done, as two versions of the same thing—in Jonathan’s case, enslaved natives. I felt like I had seen enough barnacled Rastafarian hunchbacked Calibans to last me a lifetime. I felt like the sense in which he is the beating heart of the play was diminished by making him merely a put-upon native. David Troughton and I wanted to keep him very, very simple, and all we ended up with was a single clawlike hand and a very pale, hairless body. In the end I felt he was absolutely wonderful in the part and incredibly touching.

Simon Russell Beale’s performance was in a way the most remarkable. Again we started off with a series of theatrical conceits we were going to attempt and abandoned them one after the other as we progressed. I sometimes think that’s the true process of rehearsals—stripping away idea after idea, leaving one simple, beautiful one and that’s what happened here. He was going to have a doll face, he was going to have some strange wig, he was going to wear white gloves and slippers, and it ended up as simply him in a blue Chairman Mao suit. He was a remarkably cold and restrained Ariel. You sensed always that there was a vast world that he was giving you only the merest glimpse of. Everything he did was in order to fulfill his obligations to Prospero and nothing more. When he appeared to be happy, it was exactly that, appearing to be happy, a pretense of happiness, a performance of happiness in order to become free again.

Goold:
The greatest problem is simply where to start. How can I be “other” when my references are all human? I do think our arctic context gave both actors a useful framework to work with though. Caliban’s “fishiness” worked well with a sort of seal-skin-wearing semi-Inuit, and John Light and I watched a couple of wonderful Inuit films which gave us both physical and spiritual entry points.

For Ariel I really wanted the production to find something truly terrifying and threatening. I was very interested in the relationship between
Dr. Faustus
and
The Tempest:
two god-defying magicians—one who drowns his book, the other who screams, “I’ll burn my books,” but at the moment of his damnation when it is too late. The textual and thematic resonances are fascinating and I think I was equally intrigued by a Mephistophelean Ariel. A spirit who is the agent of the magic but also the source of the magician’s power.

Literary critics and cultural historians have become particularly interested in
The Tempest
in relation to the dynamics of imperialism, colonial history, and race: Did you make a conscious effort to address these concerns in your research for, and rehearsal of, the play?

Brook:
It’s too easy to slap simplistic politics onto Shakespeare. There was a time when military uniforms and references to colonialism refreshed the old Shakespeare imagery—today one must think again. The relationships are eternal; they, too, don’t need to be illustrated by overused clichés.

Mendes:
I think that the more I study the play the more I agree with the cultural historians that it is in some part a discourse on race and slavery and you can’t ignore that. However, I didn’t focus on that in this production because I felt like that had been very well explored and other things interested me more. In large part one’s own production of the play is part of a cultural history, and the question, “Is this at root a piece of colonial discourse?” had just been asked the year before by Jonathan Miller’s production. To say it again was not very interesting. So you do become, to a degree, a victim of timing.

But directing
The Tempest
forces a personal response, as it’s simply impossible to tick all the boxes. It is one of the most bottomless, unfathomable, and profoundly mysterious plays ever written in the English language. Written toward the end of his life, it might be about elements of Shakespeare himself, might be about colonialism. Ted Hughes makes an incredibly strong point about how it is the concluding passage of Shakespeare’s obsession with the Boar, rooted in Dido and Aeneas, and images that haunt him throughout his career, and when you read that you think, “Well of course that’s what the play’s about.”

4.
Prospero (Alec McCowen), defiant Ariel in “Chairman Mao” suit (Simon Russell Beale), and sleeping Miranda (Sarah Woodward) in Act 1 Scene 2 of Sam Mendes’ 1993 RSC production.

And then how do you account for the masque? Is the play itself a masque? Peter Hall in his first production with John Gielgud played it absolutely straight down the line as a masque and that is fully justified also. There are many, many ways of interpreting this play and that is why it continues to be done. I think the job of the director is to relish and embrace the very personal nature of his response and not try and make a production that pleases all. I don’t think with a play like this that that is possible. It pushes you to make choices and that is what is thrilling about it. It is also why a lot of directors—for example, Peter Hall and Peter Brook—have returned to the play more
than once. It is one of those plays that reflects your state of mind when you are doing it.

I was thinking about doing the play again and did some research on it. I stumbled on descriptions of my own production and it was as alien to me as other people’s productions. I thought, “Wow, did I really do that?” There were photographs of it and I couldn’t remember where it had come from. I think that is one of the wonderful gifts of this play. It is a Chinese box of a play. “Infinite riches in a little room,” in Christopher Marlowe’s phrase [in
The Jew of Malta
]. It really is the most haiku-like of his plays. There aren’t very many signs pointing the way for you and that’s its glorious strength and its challenge.

Goold:
Not at a racial level. I suppose I felt the play had become a vessel for postcolonial readings through the twentieth century and that this was always liable to compromise the ethereal sense of magic in the play. Caliban and Ariel are, after all, magical creatures. That said, the idea of the Arctic—a shifting, evaporating, oft-claimed but never owned environment—did interest me. That just as Prospero’s vengeance melts away, so maybe does his island, and so the equating of territory with conflict became metaphorical.