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Authors: William Shakespeare
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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. 36
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. 37
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.” 38
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 lanternlowered 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. 39
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. 40
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.
Playing Prospero
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) 41
How to reconcile these varying moods and create a balanced performance that has narrative drive is the challenge presented to theactor. The “refractory elements … that have not yet found complete release” 42 —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 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. 37
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.” 38
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 lanternlowered 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. 39
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. 40
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.
Playing Prospero
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) 41
How to reconcile these varying moods and create a balanced performance that has narrative drive is the challenge presented to theactor. The “refractory elements … that have not yet found complete release” 42 —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