The casting in this production of The Tempest pulled together a multitude of threads and issues that have dominated the portrayal of these characters for the last century. Kananu Kirimi was the first woman to play Ariel on the main stage at Stratford since 1952. In 1970 and in 1988 the director Jonathan Miller used black actors in the parts, but this production, which cast a black actress as Ariel, opened up a "chance to explore parallels between colonisation of blacks by whites and of women by men."69 Caliban and Ariel were described as "Caribbeans, seduced and exploited by Malcolm Storry's commanding Prospero."70 It brought to The Tempest the politics of gender and race prevalent in contemporary criticism:
Throughout, the production shows how the urge to power can turn a paradise into a hell. In his harness and metal slave collar, Geff Francis's dignified and moving Caliban (who speaks the most haunting poetry in the play) is clearly a man more sinned against than sinning, and at the end, as Prospero begs the audience to set him free, the manacled Caliban remains, like a lingering rebuke to his cruel master.71
At the end of the play Prospero acknowledges responsibility for the damage he has done. Frankenstein-like, his rejection of this prodigious being as "human" and his subsequent neglect awakens the "monster" in Caliban. Instead of nurturing what he doesn't understand, and raising Caliban as he would his own child, he identifies him as something "other." Prospero's harsh treatment breeds resentment, anger, outrage, and frustration to such a degree that Caliban plots his murder--avenging the man who usurped him as ruler of the isle.
In Sam Mendes' 1993 production, Ariel's vitriol was equal to Caliban's. His dominant command of the island's magic weakened Alec McCowen's impact as Prospero, and made Ariel the more imposing figure:
In our production we had a very interesting portrayal of Ariel. Simon Russell Beale doesn't really look like an "airy spirit": he was more of an equal, which made Prospero's impatience and fury with him all the more justified and understandable. I think when Prospero screams and shouts at an Ariel played by a wispy little (sometimes feminine) person or a child, it makes him appear impossibly bullying.72
The watchful stillness of Simon Russell Beale's blue, Mao-suited Ariel holds the dangerous tension of a coiled spring as its energy is about to be liberated; the ticking of a time-bomb whose moment is about to come. Held by silken bonds of gratitude and the exercise of a power different from, but no greater than, his own, he performs the tasks Prospero sets him with meticulous ease and a hint of contempt at their largely trumpery nature.73
The positioning of this Ariel at the center of the stage in the first scene, controlling the magic of Prospero's storm, was unusual. His power was depicted as equal to Prospero's, leading to a very strained tension between master and servant. Reviewers talk of Ariel's barely concealed hatred.
Prospero's last action is the release of Ariel. This moment can express a close, friendly relationship between master and servant. But it can also convey Ariel's impatience at the prospect of his liberty. Thus, Mark Rylance's Ariel had already gone when Prospero spoke the words that were supposed to release him. Sam Mendes offered a startling revision of the entire relationship between Prospero and Ariel. The previously unemotional, efficient servant turned to Prospero and, spitting in his face, released the hatred and disgust accumulated during the twelve years of his servitude. The subsequent epilogue for Alec McCowen became the painful, weary recognition of his project's failure and a true prayer for pardon and relief from the "good hands" of the audience.
The Inexhaustible Tempest
The Tempest seems to be inexhaustible. Clifford Williams' pessimistic view of the play was criticized in 1963, but prefigured interpretations to come:
In this play Shakespeare includes all the themes from his earlier work--kingship, inheritance, treachery, conscience, identity, love, music, God; he draws them together as if to find the key to it all, but there is no such key. There is no grand order and Prospero returns to Milan not bathed in tranquillity, but a wreck.74
For Sam Mendes, "The Tempest is, among other things about politics in a profound sense: moral and social order in human society. Who commands and why? Who obeys and why?"75 "In [Michael] Boyd's hands, this movingly becomes a play about the acquisition of grace and self-knowledge."76 David Thacker believes that "The Tempest is an autobiographical play ... in which Shakespeare is dealing with the nature of his artistic achievement and the need to give up writing."77 To James McDonald,
It's a tempest of the mind ... shaped by people getting rid of extremes of emotion of grief and madness. And from that, rebirth can come.... [It] is about a number of huge opposites: drowning and rebirth, freedom and slavery, revenge and forgiveness, nature and nurture, sleeping and waking, seeming and being. An issue like colonialism is in there, but it's not all that the play's about.... Prospero ... has to learn to forgive people for the wrongs they have done. And that's a very difficult thing to do.78
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH PETER BROOK, SAM MENDES, RUPERT GOOLD
Peter Brook is the most revered director of the second half of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Born in 1925, he first directed at Stratford in 1947. His work has been influenced by a range of approaches from Antonin Artaud's "theater of cruelty" and Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theater" to Indian and African notions of storytelling; The Empty Space, his book of 1968, remains the best introduction to his art. Following his groundbreaking 1970 "white box and circus skills" Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford, he moved to Paris and founded his International Centre for Theatre Research. He continued to produce innovative work at his intimate Bouffes du Nord Theatre well into his eighties. He has directed The Tempest no fewer than four times: in 1957, with John Gielgud as Prospero, again in 1963 and 1968, then in 1990 with his company of international actors at the Bouffes. In this interview, he speaks mostly about the last of these productions.
Sam Mendes was born in 1965 and began directing classic drama both for the RSC and on the West End stage soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was artistic director of the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London. His first movie, American Beauty (1999), won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. His 1993 RSC production of The Tempest, which he talks about here, featured Alec McCowen as Prospero and Simon Russell Beale as Ariel.
Rupert Goold was born in 1977. He studied at Cambridge and was an assistant director at the Donmar under Mendes. After undertaking a range of experimental work, he directed two highly acclaimed Shakespearean productions with the veteran stage and television actor Patrick Stewart: The Tempest of 2006, which he talks about here, part of the RSC's year-long Complete Works Festival, and an intimate Macbeth in 2007 at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, with a transfer to London's West End.
The storm offers a spectacular opening to the play. How did you approach it from a design point of view?
Brook: The first scene of The Tempest needs to be a beginning, leading one into the story. If it becomes a show in itself, the play cannot survive. Once, I staged it experimentally around a swinging plank, covered with bricks, with a model galleon in the middle. The actors stood behind and played the text--for once every word was heard! Then Prospero took a brick and smashed the ship. At once, Miranda cried out her protest and the story began. Then, when we did the play at the Bouffes, Ariel carried the model boat on his head, rocking a long tube full of pebbles to evoke the sound of waves as it was rocked and the actors held sticks to suggest the movements of the sea. This led straight into the scene between Prospero and Miranda--and the audience wanted to know more.
Mendes: The way I approached the storm was tied into my whole approach to the play. I would say that my production explored the play along lines that, crudely put, see Prospero as a director and his subjects as actors, and the journey of the play as an enactment created by Prospero in an empty space in order to lead to what he hopes will be ultimate resolution. My sense of the production now is that it was what I would call a young man's vision of
the play. It was full of ideas and probably quite imaginative but not entirely rigorous in its thought process! It's a play that I'd love to do again and would now do quite differently.
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 cliches of a lighter-than-air dancer like Ariel. Instead we had an African actor, Bakary Sangare, 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. Everythin
g 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 cliches.