Reviewer:
Richard Findlater
Drama Magazine
The new Tempest at Stratford
opens with a memorable coup de théâtre,
which has the bold simplicity of RSC design and direction at its best.
As the King of Naples’s ship ‘splits’ off Prospero’s island,
heading into the audience with sail full-stretched like a vast heraldic banner,
it is almost instantly replaced, in the thunder and lightening of the storm, by
the image of another ship, wrecked long ago, with tattered sails and broken
masts. This, you feel at once, must be the ‘bark’ on which Prospero was
beached, 12 years earlier; and here stands the exiled Duke of Milan, back to the
audience, slowly lowering
This haunting romantic ruin is the setting of the whole play, with no
decorations or additions beyond a kind of proscenium curtain for the masque (and
Prospero’s concealment of the chess-playing lovers).
Designed by Maria Bjornson, it provides a cohesive, strong but
distracting framework which enables the director, Ron Daniels, to achieve and
maintain an unusual degree of poetic, pictorial and musical unity, with the help
of Stephen Oliver’s excellent sounds and sweet airs and Maria Bjornson’s
costumes. Against the bleached
background of the ships’ graveyard she contrives with admirable economy
(artistic and fiscal) to score small but spectacular effects:
notably, in the three shimmering, full-throated goddesses with gold lurex-threaded
wigs and sequinned rainbow gowns, celestial operatic smilers whose radiance
suggests a mirth of appropriately supernatural intensity.
Unearthly cloning is also, somewhat less convincingly, evoked by Ariel
and his five fellow-sprites, all on the go, or striking balletic poses, in
one-piece silver-grey anatomical tights, decorated in red and blue with tracings
of veins and arteries, and topped by silver wigs punkishly flushed with pink.
Not until the final curtain did I notice the emphatic and seductive
gender of at least two of these unisex fairies, which may be ascribed to the
designer’s skill (and Richard Riddell’s lighting) rather than to the
critic’s myopic enchantment.
Derek Jacobi’s Prospero is the most credibly human portrait, in my
experience, of Miranda’s father, Ariel’s friend (as well as master) and the
avenging magus transformed into a forgiving realist who knows that when his
charms are broken his enemies, however penitent, ‘shall be themselves’
again. He lacks something of
Gielgud’s lyrical magic and Redgrave’s penetrating power; but the fact that
his performance stands up so firmly to such comparisons illustrates Mr.
Jacobi’s still-growing mastery of the stage.
Among the more memorable aspects of his performance are the gentle
tenderness shown by Prospero for his daughter, and the warm affection in a
different kind he reveals for Ariel; when, at the end, Prospero suddenly
apprehends that his ‘tricksy spirit’ will soon have left him for ever, Mr.
Jacobi cuts us to the quick with his projected sense of anguished loss and
emptiness. He seems a younger
Prospero than some of his predecessors chose to present, but that should be no
obstacle to our belief or enjoyment: Miranda
is, after all, not yet 16, and the RSC does some service to audiences, as well
as actors, by demonstrating—as in this year’s Lear
with Michael Gambon—that such roles need not be venerably ancient. Like Redgrave’s Prospero (and, perhaps, like Shakespeare
himself: the parallel seems
inescapable) Jacobi’s magus is terminally exhausted by his necromantic reign.
But it is experience, not old age, that makes him talk about a retirement
where ‘every third thought shall be my grave’, bereft of the ‘art to
enchant’, bereft of Ariel and Miranda, too.
Watching Derek Jacobi at Stratford, remembering Gielgud and Redgrave, it
is hard to credit (in spite of disappointments and even disasters during the
past 30 years) that so many leading actors in so many generations ignored this
role: that Prospero could be
dismissed by Macready as a ‘characterless, stupid old proser of
commonplace.’ Some may have been
oppressed by an enlarged sense of autobiographical responsibility to the author:
the widespread feeling that, in Max Beerbohm’s words, ‘he who
impersonates Prospero impersonates also the creator of Prospero, and
. . . so we need of him a double dignity and weight.’
Beerbohm described The Tempest
as ‘the least Shakespearian of all Shakespeare’s plays’ because the author
‘put more of himself into it’ than into any other work. For an actor to try to satisfy what Beerbohm called ‘our
hunger for a realization of Prospero’s creator’ is an invitation to the
wrong sort of shipwreck. Yet in Mr.
Jacobi’s performance, especially in his delivery of the later speeches and the
epilogue, there are unmistakable and (one feels) authentic echoes of the
master’s voice, and this effect is achieved without a show of ‘dignity’ or
nudging revelation.
Perhaps this fine performance of Prospero may turn out to be as
significant a step in Derek Jacobi’s career as Michael Redgrave’s was for
him at Stratford 31 years ago: Redgrave was then 43, Jacobi’s age today.
He shows a commanding authority, technical range, stamina, insight and
voice. Theoretical problems of
playing Prospero dissolve in practice. Seeing
the play afresh, this seems the way to do the part, even to be
it.
I am not convinced that this may be said for Bob Peck’s interpretation
of Caliban—a dark, simian, crouching figure in a loin cloth, with suppurating
sores on his back and a Rasta-like coiffure of matted, braided hair.
Mr. Peck smoulders, plausibly, with rebellious rage and lust; he sustains
a skilful fluency of ape-like movement and bodily rhythm; he handles the ‘Be
not afeared’ speech with unforced lyricism; and, as in all his work that I
have seen, he shows himself to be a powerful, thinking, acute and versatile
actor. But for me, in this Caliban,
there is not enough poignancy or menace, too much naturalism, not enough
mystery. The sound
doesn’t match the look of this
monster; and the actor at work—very hard work it is, to be sure—seems too
plainly visible beneath the make-up.
An easier victory is won by Mark Rylance as Ariel; he has enough speed,
edge and translucency, a blend of featherweight and quicksilver, to o’erleap
the pitfalls of pantomime feyness and to help one forget the subtler spells long
ago of Alan Badel and Brian Bedford. Christopher
Benjamin and Alun Armstrong do their accomplished best to keep Stephano and
Trinculo alive through laughter. The
rest of the acting company serve the play and the production well enough.