Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Times Lit. Supplement
1982
“The isle is full of noises”:
Ron Daniels has taken his cue from Caliban for this new production of The
Tempest at the main house at Stratford.
We are offered a Desert Island Disc show that descends the musical scale
from Ariel’s sweet airs and firefly lyrics that hang like promises in the air,
to the twangling brass and timpani of a golden masque of Juno.
This production treats the play not as a brooding chamber piece, cast
within a magic circle, but as an operatic spectacular, with Prosper as
impressario in his exotic island retreat. Maria
Bjornson’s set of a wretched spectral barque, with cobwebbed rigging and
tattered sails, is both highly serviceable, and lends a Rackhamesque enchantment
to the stage. Ariel (Mark Rylance) is an androgynous punk, in a
body-stocking of exposed veins and sinews, that makes him seem less like an airy
spirit, than a strange transparent sea-creature from full five fathoms deep.
He is attended by a backing group of clones who hang crooning from the
rigging. Or hover in their iridescent parachutes.
This is a magic show, and each of Prospero’s conjuring tricks is the
occasion for a coup de théâtre. Ariel
rises, shimmering his harpy wings to denounce the three men of sin from a
candle-lit, gift-wrapped fruit-bowl. His
troupe of lookalikes drive skeletal dogs with glowing snouts to hunt the other
malefactors on the island.
But this is not merely a production of gimmicks, for at the centre of it
all is a powerful, but low-key interpretation of Prospero by Derek Jacobi. This is a performance whose authority comes from an
unassertive humanity, from lines which are meditated rather than declaimed, and
sentences that are delivered as much in sorrow as in anger. Jacobi’s Prospero is a mortal, a scholar whose acquired
magical skills seem to be a burden, an embarrassment and a surprise.
When he announces “Our revels now are ended” there is a kind of
relief mingled with the resignation in his voice.
We are made to understand the appeal of exchanging the insubstantial
pageantry of moral showbiz for the solid authority of a dukedom; or perhaps, in
Shakespeare’s terms, of renouncing the stage in favor of the retired life of a
landowner.
The shipwrecked nobles at first appear like beached crustaceans,
clambering awkwardly ashore beneath the weight of their heavy sea-green armour. Gradually, as the delicate atmosphere of the island steals
over them, Adrian (William Haden) and Gonzalo (Edward Jewesbury), discard their
outer shells. But Antonio (Richard
O’Mahoney) and Sebastian (Jeffery Dench) are hard-boiled types, a pair of
Machiavellian mannequins who keep their wits and breast-plates about them.
There is some fine clowning from Christopher Benjamin as Stephano, Alun
Armstrong as Trinculo and Bob Peck as Caliban in routines which combine the
slapstick precision of pantomime with a sly verbal patter that milks but does
not drain the text. Their antics as
would-be colonists, who believe that power comes out of a barrel of fire-water,
offer a striking parody of the more sophisticated power-games of Antonia and
Sebastian. Stephano roars, Trinculo
snivels, and Caliban, a Ben Gunn in dreadlocks, cavorts like a black-and-white
monster. Alice Krige plays Miranda
with a credible gawky innocence that nevertheless admits rather more than a few
blushes of desire. While attending
to her father she is a schoolgirl in pigtails, but when she moves through the
island she is the wild thing of Caliban’s dreams.
Michael Maloney as Ferdinand carries logs with all the
unaffected clumsiness of a vacationing undergraduate on a building site.
If there is a weakness in this production, it lies in the eclecticism of
its various effects. Stephen
Oliver’s music plays a major part in creating the magical atmosphere of the
island, yet there seems to be no unifying idiom to his airs and arrangements. This masque of Juno is a glittering set-piece in the baroque
manner of Purcell, which teeters on the brink of parody.
Most of the rest of the music of the isles is impressionistic and
ethereal, played on electric pipes of Pan; but the set itself seems to cry out
for the Romantic melodies of The Flying Dutchman. All
things are possible to a magician, and Prospero may just as well call up spirits
from Star Wars as from Olympus or the
Cabbala. But at times one has the
impression that the old showman is clearing out his props cupboard for
Positively His Final Appearance.
Yet by the end, Jacobi’s softly-spoken magician has developed such an
intimacy with the audience that his epilogue strikes us not as a conventional
set-piece, but as a thoughtful challenge both to himself and to us. We have seen him give up the role of playing god, and shrink
from a magus to a mortal. Ariel has
been released, to make the best, or the worst, of his freedom.
The powers have all been switched off; we are left to our own devices in
a Godless universe, with only the remembered images of Prospero’s pageant to
guide us. “My ending is
despair/Unless I be relieved by prayer.”
Prospero’s renunciation of this magic powers as the stage lights dim,
becomes a moving, symbolic event that ignites the light of our consciences.
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