The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

  The dominant theme in twentieth-century productions was the exploration of the play as colonial experience, evident even in the pro-imperial Beerbohm Tree production of 1904. Romanticism had changed attitudes to Caliban and it was Macready's 1838 revival of Shakespeare's text that "confirmed ... the romantic critics' more sympathetic conceptions of Caliban."4 As Vaughan and Vaughan record, it was in this production that "the modern Caliban, victim of oppression, was born."5 Caliban became less comic but more monstrous; when in 1854 in New York the leading comic actor William Burton took the part in his own theater, the anonymous New York Times reviewer records how

  A wild creature on all fours sprang upon the stage, with claws on his hands, and some weird animal arrangement about the head partly like a snail. It was an immense conception. Not the great God Pan himself was more the link between the man and the beast than this thing. It was a creature of the woods, one of nature's spawns; it breathed of nuts and herbs, and rubbed itself against the back of trees.6

  Charles Kean's 1857 Caliban had similarly animal overtones suggesting "the dawn of the apish Caliban"7 which dominated stage versions toward the end of the nineteenth century, influenced by Daniel Wilson's Caliban, the Missing Link (1873) in which Shakespeare's creation of the misshapen Caliban suggested the Bard's intuitive grasp of evolutionary theory.

  Actor-managers Beerbohm Tree and F. R. Benson both chose to play Caliban in preference to Prospero. Benson's wife records how her husband "spent many hours watching monkeys and baboons in the Zoo, in order to get the movements and postures in keeping with his 'make-up,' " in a costume which she described as "half-monkey, half coco-nut," noting that he "delighted in swarming up a tree on the stage and hanging from the branches head downwards while he gibbered at 'Trinculo.' "8 Tyrone Power in Daly's 1897 production invoked the same idea. According to William Winter, the New York Daily Tribune reviewer, he played Caliban as a "brutish creature, the hideous, malignant clod of evil, in whom, nevertheless, the germs of intelligence, feeling and fanciful perception are beginning to stir."9 Beerbohm Tree's Caliban in 1904 stressed Caliban's humanity, arguing that "in his love of music and his affinity with the unseen world, we discern in the soul which inhabits the brutish body of this elemental man the germs of a sense of beauty, the dawn of art."10 The production's most famous scene was the final tableau showing Caliban alone once more on his island as the Neapolitans sailed for home:

  Caliban creeps from his cave and watches.... Caliban listens for the last time to the sweet air [Ariel's song], then turns sadly in the direction of the departing ship. The play is ended. As the curtain rises again, the ship is seen on the horizon, Caliban stretching out his arms toward it in mute despair. The night falls, and Caliban is left on the lonely rock. He is king once more.11

  In the second half of the twentieth century Caliban has frequently been represented as black, initially by white actors in blackface. The first black actor to play the part was Canada Lee in Margaret Webster's 1945 New York production, although in many ways his performance harked back to the monstrous representations of earlier productions: "Lee wore a scaly costume and grotesque mask, moved with an animal-like crouch, and emphasized Caliban's monstrousness."12 In the past fifty years Caliban has evolved from comic grotesque to "noble savage." Jeanne Addison Roberts described Henry Baker's performance at the 1970 Washington Summer Festival Shakespeare production: "Baker's black skin, his somewhat flawed enunciation, a minstrel-show mouth painted grotesquely in a greenish face, and the use of the word 'slave' evoked instantly for the Washington audience the American Negro."13

  1. Frank Benson as a fish-eating Caliban in the 1890s, represented as a creature akin to Charles Darwin's "missing link" between ape and human.

  Baker's Caliban refused to be cowed or subdued: "Caliban was now a black militant, angry and recalcitrant."14 In the same year Jonathan Miller's production at the Mermaid Theatre drew on Octave Mannoni's anthropological study of colonial oppression, Prospero and Caliban,15 which used these two characters as emblems of the colonial paradigm. One reviewer described Rudolph Walker's Caliban as "an uneducated field Negro" in contrast to Norman Beaton's Ariel, a "competent, educated 'houseboy.' "16 Historians of the play's afterlife regard the early 1980s as representing the "climax of Caliban's politicization"17 in productions around the world. It is perhaps as a reaction against this trend that directors in the early twenty-first century seem to have become interested in Ariel again.

  Whereas Prospero had traditionally been regarded as an elderly benign father-figure, a tradition that continued well into the twentieth century, more recent productions have often cast a much younger man and explored the contradictions within the text to reveal a complex, demanding character. The actor most deeply associated with the role in the twentieth century was Sir John Gielgud who performed it four times in the theater, the first time at the Old Vic in 1930 at the astonishingly young age of twenty-six. His interpretation evolved over the years and subsequent productions, culminating in the grave, beautiful performance in Peter Greenaway's extraordinary film adaptation, Prospero's Books. As one critic puts it,

  Gielgud has made the part very much his own, developing and deepening his interpretation over the years. From the rather nebulous shape of his first benevolent Prospero he has gradually explored the tensions and misgivings in the character so as to make him an altogether more dramatically complex and interesting figure. Through his successive assumptions of the part he has been instrumental in bringing about a revaluation of the play: a consideration of its serious themes as against an attitude to the work as an escapist romance dressed up in exotic trimmings and offering an opportunity for spectacular theatrical pyrotechnics.18

  With the impact of "realistic" media such as film and television, there has been renewed interest and focus on the theatricality of theater and the metatheatricality of The Tempest has been explored by a number of directors. In 1968 Peter Brook directed a radical experimental production at the Roundhouse against a background of the cultural revolution of the 1960s which brought together players from France, Britain, Japan and the United States to explore theatrical techniques of expression. For the opening storm, for instance, a Japanese actor crouched vocalising sounds of wind and terror whilst the rest huddled together whimpering and trembling. It was an investigation of certain themes of the play, essentially mounted as an exercise for actors. It was, however, to bear fruit in many of Brook's subsequent productions, most notably his celebrated Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970.19

  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."20 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."21 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": terri
fying 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.22

  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.23

  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?"24 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, "Abhorred 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.

  AT THE RSC

  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.25

  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.26

  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.

  Designing the Enchanted Isle

  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.27

  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."28 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."29 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."30

  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.31

  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.32