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.
When Gonzalo talks about the "golden age" and how he would govern the isle, he is teased by the other characters. Do you think it's essential that he should be regarded by the audience as a man of great dignity, a kind of moral center, or can we share in the mockery?
Brook: Gonzalo: Always in Shakespeare opposites coexist. The man of peace has an ideal, it needs to be felt as real--and at the same time he is completely out of touch with reality. So he's both touching and comic, like so many well-meaning dreamers.
Mendes: I think as always with a Shakespeare play that both are true. At times he's a boring old buffoon. Yet he's a very, very kind man who has saved Prospero. I think it's dangerous to make him merely one or the other. In that respect it's a three-dimensional portrait.
Goold: Both, surely. The jokes are funny and should be, as should Gonzalo's optimism in the face of catastrophe, but I think his handling of Alonso in particular shows a very shrewd and sensitive man.
Conversely, are Stephano and Trinculo just drunken clowns, or is there more to their role in the drama?
Brook: Stephano, Trinculo, and the plot to murder Prospero are a vital part of the dark underworld of the play which must be there to balance its fun, charm, and lightness.
Mendes: I think Jan Kott [in his classic study Shakespeare Our Contemporary] makes the point that they are a distorted version of the central story of the play. They play out a vaudevillian version of the king-making central plot. You get a sense of the subplot echoing the main plot, parodying those other characters. It also allows us to review the central plot, when we return to it, with greater clarity. So their purpose in the play is important. If you took them out of the play it would actually destroy it, because what they do in unlocking Caliban and making him aware of the "glories of drink" has a lot to do with one's understanding of the nature of master-servant relationships and what "freedom" means.
With the subject, I tried to push that sense in which no one is ever fully able to control their subjects a little further. I made Trinculo (played by David Bradley) into a ventriloquist with a dummy dressed exactly like he was. When Ariel possesses Trinculo and makes him speak with Prospero's voice he possessed his ventriloquist's dummy instead. So again there was another version of the master unable to control his subject or the director unable to control his actors theme. We explored that to great length, particularly with Ariel. How nobody is a willing subject. Ultimately there is no such thing as a person who doesn't want on some level to control their own life and therefore to hold power. In that respect, going back to your earlier question, Gonzalo becomes a sort of a hero because he's the only person in the play who is willingly a subject.
Goold: The clowns are very hard because they arrive so late and the gabardine sequence is so bloody difficult and so vaudeville. However, their second scene is, I think, the best in the play. The way the violence shifts between them and infects Caliban is extraordinarily rich. We always called it the "Jamie Bulger" scene as the horrifying scenario of two bullying infant thugs leading a confused Caliban on a journey of violence seemed very familiar.
The text is explicit that Miranda is fifteen years old: what were the consequences of that for your production?
Brook: We looked for the youngest girls we could find--in the end we had two of roughly the right age.
Mendes: I wanted someone who had a little bit more stage presence. When you are on a big stage, casting someone who is genuinely a girl doesn't always work. I think traditionally Mirandas fall into two categories: the tomboy Miranda who has taken after her father because the only thing she has ever known is the company of men; and the more feminine Miranda whose burgeoning sexuality is something that Prospero is increasingly mystified by but keenly feels the approach of.
The sexual jealousy of Prospero, and the tension between his wanting to give Miranda to Ferdinand and his wanting to retain her, is actually one of the best reasons to cast her at the age that she is supposed to be, and that may be one reason why Shakespeare is so explicit about her age. But I went for somebody who was already moving toward womanhood and had left her father behind, partly because I was interested in working with Sarah Woodward again, who could carry off some of the stridency of the role without losing sympathy. Also partly because Sarah makes me laugh and I think Miranda is actually a very funny part. She has the biggest laugh of the evening with "O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here!"
Goold: We looked at what happens to girls who are brought up by their fathers alone. In the eighties there was a rash of girl prodigies, taught by ambitious fathers at home, going to Oxford at about the same age who all were hugely developed intellectually but retarded socially and sexually. We brought a child psychologist in who guided us on this but perhaps the greatest question any actor must answer is what has happened in the claimed rape story with Caliban. We developed quite a complex backstory around Miranda's first menstruat
ion, and both Caliban and Prospero's response to it, to create a terrible event that all three of them had no real understanding of or ability to deal with.
What did your production infer from Antonio's silence in the face of Prospero's forgiveness of him?
Brook: Quite rightly, he had nothing to say.
Mendes: He was unforgiven and unforgiving. The production had an unresolved, ambivalent ending on all fronts. There was nothing that went exactly as Prospero had planned it.
Goold: That the feeling was not mutual. Of course it can be played as an expression of guilt but our whole approach to Act 5 was one of bathos. Prospero expects a great reconciliation but most of the lords treat him with a suspicion and hostility that is only interrupted by Miranda, Ferdinand, and the clowns. We played all of Act 5 as a messy, frustrating failure for Prospero, partly because we wanted to present the epilogue in as bleak and desolate a way as possible. A man with no answers, friends, or powers. As such, a brother whose hatred is still explicit seemed the most useful.
John Gielgud said that the one thing he did consistently as Prospero in the four different productions in which he played the part over more than forty years was never to look Ariel directly in the face. With what sort of emotions did Prospero and Ariel part from each other in your production?
Brook: John Gielgud made history at the time by playing Prospero clean-shaven. He also showed his violent anger. The play is called The Tempest not because of a noisy first scene, but because peace and calm, inner and outer only come at the very end when Prospero has managed to overcome his anger, his wish for revenge and his need for power. Until then, deep in his nature he remains Antonio's blood brother--the tempest is everywhere. As for emotions, the question is absurd. You don't define them, you play them.
5. Prospero (John Gielgud) in command over a cowering Ariel (Brian Bedford) in Peter Brook's production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1957.
Mendes: When Ariel was finally released he vented his spleen on Prospero and famously, I suppose now, spat in his face. That was the most controversial aspect of the production, but it felt absolutely earned and justified in his reading of the role. It was quite exciting to be in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and to have people shout out. I watched a performance and two people shouted out "Rubbish!" when he spat in his face. I rather liked it. It was an electric moment and it suddenly made you pity Prospero in a way that nothing else in the evening could have made you do. Suddenly he was the one who was lost. He has lost his powers and when he says, "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint," it really meant something. He was talking in the moment. It didn't seem preplanned. It seemed a response to what Ariel had just done to him. So to me that was a thrilling discovery. But it was entirely, as is often the case, due to a particular journey that I as the director and a group of actors had gone on. If I tried to impose it on another production, it wouldn't work at all. It was an organic thing that emerged out of rehearsals.
Goold: Ariel only of release, a deep single sob of relief and annihilation. Prospero of confusion and sentiment--as one might release a treasured pet into the wild, hoping that he will look back but not really expecting it. This is all linked to the Act 5 reading I've outlined. Our Prospero wanted closure--with Miranda, Antonio, his magic, the island even--but life cannot be nicely stage-managed in the way he had hoped and once emotions were let in the ordered ending he had planned was in ruins.
What do you think was the hardest choice you had to make in creating your production of the play?
Brook: I can never understand this word "choice," which recurs constantly in Actor's Studio jargon. You certainly have to work hard and then in the end the choices make themselves by themselves.
Mendes: I think what is most difficult is how to realize the spiritual world. Unless you have a specific literal setting for the play, you have to render the spiritual world in a way that is convincing for a modern audience and feels real. The specter of people in lycra with floaty pastel colors and net curtains rushing around pretending to be fairies is the thing that haunted me and I wanted to avoid. But that is also the reason that you do it. You do it because you don't have the answers to everything and because you are scared by the play and how impossible it appears. Those are the things that draw you to it. That's why I do what I do.
6. Kananu Kirimi in Michael Boyd's production.
7. Julian Bleach as Ariel in Rupert Goold's Arctic-set 2006 RSC production, designed by Giles Cadle, with costumes by Nicky Gillibrand.
8. Bakary Sangare as Ariel in La Tempete, directed by Peter Brook.
Goold: Before we started the preproduction I went to see John Barton to get some insight--this was my first RSC Shakespeare and I figured I'd need all the help I could get. John told me the play was poor, one of Shakespeare's worst. That it could be done only two ways; either in the manner of Peter Brook, spare and ritualized, or as a big show with lots of effects and magic. He said the former never worked because it was just too portentous and dull and the plot was too silly to sustain such a reverent reading, and that the latter was just gaudy but at least had the virtue of the audiences enjoying it. He had directed the play at Stratford and seen forty years of productions and this was his considered conclusion on a play meant to be read not staged and knocked off quickly by a writer at the end of their career! The truth is that I'm afraid I rather agreed with him as I, too, had always found the lack of narrative energy, the absence of threat to Prospero and the general Robinson Crusoe atmosphere pretty dull in performance myself. I decided I would at least try and marry these "holy" and spectacular elements--a staging that was theatrical and magical yet also hard-edged and cruel; one that could fill a large theater and yet not become just a pageant. Of course, once you actually start work on any Shakespeare you can only see the million other choices you might have made and how rich and humbling his genius is. The hardest choice of all was in believing that we might ever succeed in doing the play justice.
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER
IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday--an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and riva
l Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.