422

Stage history and adaptations

It’s possible that The Tempest was specially written for the Blackfriars theatre, where Shakespeare’s company began performing in 1609, but it was likely that it was also performed at the Globe during the summer months . In any case the only surviving text, that of the 1623 Folio, has unusually detailed stage directions and requires a great deal of music . It was also acted several times at court: once for James I in 1611, again during the celebrations for his daughter’s wedding in 1613 .However spectacular those early performances, however, they would be trumped after the Restoration with the appearance of William Davenant and John Dryden’s adaptation The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), which featured impressive stage machinery but less than a third of the original text . Davenant introduced several new characters – among them “Hippolito”, an innocent male counterpart to Miranda – and emphasized the piece’s comedy (to the delight of Pepys, who saw it several times) . Capitalizing on its runaway popularity, Thomas Shadwell mounted an “operatic” version of the same in 1674, with music mostly by Matthew Locke, which was so successful that remnants were still being performed in the nineteenth century . Making the most of The Tempest’s popularity, David Garrick launched another operatic version in 1756, though he returned to Shakespeare’s text the following year, albeit with cuts, and acted it frequently afterwards . Thomas Sheridan kept Garrick’s text when he took over Drury Lane, but John Philip Kemble reinstated some of Davenant’s changes in his productions of 1789, 1806 and 1815 . During this period Prospero was presented as unwaveringly noble, at first by Robert Bensley, then the “majestic” Kemble himself, but even so John Emery was allowed to present a sym-pathetic, near-tragic Caliban .The most influential production of the nineteenth century would prove to be William Charles Macready’s at Covent Garden in 1838, which finally restored most of Shakespeare’s script (if not his opening scene, replaced by a “grand panoramic spec-tacle” depicting the shipwreck); George Bennett’s heart-rending Caliban appeared alongside the radiant Miranda of Helen Faucit and Priscilla Horton’s jaunty Ariel . Samuel Phelps’s productions at Sadler’s Wells from the 1840s were also praised, the Times observing that they offered “the best combination of Shakespeare and scenery”, but for sheer ostentation it would be hard to outdo Charles Kean’s 1857 staging at the Princess’s Theatre . This opened with a storm scene so magnificent that the vis-iting Hans Christian Andersen was overawed (at least until his host Charles Dickens explained how it worked), and Kean’s own “mysterious” Prospero was widely praised . But in the high Victorian era The Tempest became more than ever Caliban’s play . Frank Benson took on the part during his numerous touring productions in the last decades of the century and later at Stratford, basing an athletic interpretation on chimpanzees he had observed at the zoo and making a habit of appearing on stage with a real fish in his mouth . Also pursuing the theory that Caliban was a Darwinian

423

TH e TeMPeST

“missing link” was Herbert Beerbohm Tree, whose portrayal from 1904 became famous – not least because he expanded it to make the character more appealing, closing the play with a newly “civilized” Caliban waving farewell to the Milanese ships .

By this time William Poel’s radical productions with his Elizabethan Stage Society had come and gone, and innovation was all the rage . Ben Greet’s performances at the Old Vic from 1915 lasted just two hours and starred Sybil Thorndike as Ferdinand; while John Drinkwater’s Birmingham Rep production from the same year was designed by Barry Jackson and featured E. Stewart Vinden as Ariel, the first man in the role for some two centuries . William Bridges-Adams, a Poel disciple, put on a 1919 Tempest designed to look as it might have done in 1613, and staged it again at Stratford in 1934 with Neil Porter as Prospero . Going against a hoary stage tradition that the island’s ruler was nothing if not kindly, Porter dared to present him as both irascible and distinctly unpleasant .

The most influential Prospero of the era – perhaps of the century – was John Gielgud, who first acted him under Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic in 1930 to Ralph Richardson’s Caliban . Gielgud, then just 26, dispensed with the flowing robes and beard of yore and instead created a man “rich in … melancholy”, according to one witness . In Peter Brook’s 1957 production Prospero became an essentially noble figure, returning in triumph to his dukedom in the play’s closing moments; whereas for Peter Hall, at the National in 1974, Gielgud’s interpretation had hardened into

Declan Donnellan’s 2011 fast-moving Cheek by Jowl production, with a russian cast, pointed up The Tempest’s freshness and experimentalism – memorably concluding in a masque scene that resembled a Soviet peasant opera.

424

brusque aloofness – a reading partly inspired by the Elizabethan magician and natural scientist John Dee (see p .416) . Michael Benthall’s celebrated 1951 Stratford staging, by contrast, went the other way – initially featuring Michael Redgrave’s forceful Prospero, later replacing him with the more approachable Ralph Richardson (not to mention a conventionally female Ariel, Margaret Leighton, for Alan Badel) .

If there is a single thread that connected postwar Tempests, it was a fresh concern with the play’s colonial politics . Unsurprisingly, much of the impetus behind this re-evaluation has come from North America, where Shakespeare’s “American play” was performed in New York as early as 1854 by William Burton . In 1945 Canada Lee was the first black actor to play Caliban, in a New York production directed by Margaret Webster, while Nagel Jackson’s 1970 staging in Washington had both Ariel and Caliban played by black actors (Darryl Croxton and Henry Baker respectively) in order to draw parallels with America’s slave history . Over in the UK, Jonathan Miller directed a fiercely anti-colonialist production at the Mermaid Theatre in London, also in 1970, inflected by the director’s reading of Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban, a study of the French colonization of Madagascar . Even more illuminating was the Martinique-born Aimé Césaire’s rewriting, Une Tempête (1969), which posited Caliban as a revolutionary hero . Earnest approaches such as these were intriguingly mirrored in 1990 by Peter Brook with a touring multiracial troupe, among whose number were David Bennent’s boyish Caliban and Sotugui Kouyate’s benevolent Prospero . Nine years earlier, Giorgio Strehler’s Milanese version stunned audiences with its theatrical virtuosity – much, one suspects, as Shakespeare would have wanted .

Plurality of approach as well as of casting has, naturally enough, characterized more recent productions of this much-revived play . In just one year, 1988, British audiences were treated to Peter Hall’s second NT production, with Michael Bryant’s grizzled Prospero; Declan Donnellan’s typically playful Cheek by Jowl version; a modern-dress production from Nicholas Hytner at the RSC, focused on John Wood’s all-too-human Prospero; and a Noh-influenced Japanese version directed by Yukio Ninagawa . Ariel finally got his moment under Sam Mendes at the RSC in 1993, with Simon Russell Beale’s haughty sprite allowed to spit at his master (Alec McCowen) after being granted freedom . In Jude Kelly’s 1999 West Yorkshire Playhouse produc-tion, Ian McKellen’s Prospero, wearing a plastic raincoat and a battered hat, attracted comment and some condemnation for his unrepentant grumpiness . In an even more radical approach to the play’s interpersonal relationships, the London Globe saw Vanessa Redgrave play Prospero in 2000, directed by Lenka Udovicki – though, like McKellen, Redgrave gave a pointedly gruff performance .

Derek Jacobi had his turn at imitating Gielgud at the Sheffield Crucible under Michael Grandage in 2002 in an actor-led production that nevertheless conjured plenty of theatrical magic, most striking when the ship’s billowing sailcloth was sucked into Prospero’s book . Although dramatically very different, Tim Carroll’s Elizabethan production at the Globe in 2005 also indulged author-hero fantasies by casting out-going artistic director Mark Rylance both as Prospero and his usurping brother,; the magician plotted the action on a chessboard before casting away the pieces in disgust . By contrast, Rupert Goold’s eclectic production at the RSC the following year embedded the play in Arctic ice, with Patrick Stewart’s cabin-feverish hero lording it

425

TH e TeMPeST

over Mariah Gale’s brutalized Miranda . Even doomier was David Farr’s staging at the same venue in 2012, dominated by Jonathan Slinger’s rasping and choleric Prospero .

Altogether more liquid than Goold’s production was Declan Donnellan’s return to the play with a Russian cast in 2011 (it featured sea-bound video projections and gallons of real water sloshed around the stage), but it was again centred on the tor-ments of Anya Khalilulina’s child-of-nature Miranda, visibly horrified by having to part from Alexander Feklistov’s tearful Caliban . Bangladesh’s Dhaka Theatre, sta-ging The Tempest in Bangla at the Globe as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, offered carnival and colour in the manner of the traditional panchali form, but also subtly emphasized the play’s colonial dynamics by presenting Chandan Chowdhury’s Caliban and Rubol Lodi’s Prospero as cut from the same cloth . By contrast, the version done at the same venue by Jeremy Herrin the following year was – despite its Jacobean-ish costumes – an unrepentantly old-fashioned star vehicle, centred on Roger Allam’s fatherly magus . Something similar was true at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park in summer 2015, with Public Theatre veteran Sam Waterston offering a beneficent, somewhat cuddly island ruler in a style long out of fashion .

On screen, The Tempest has inspired numerous tributes, many of them somewhat esoteric . The earliest, a filming of the shipwreck from Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s touring production, appeared in 1905; while other film adaptations range from the relatively faithful (Derek Jarman’s 1979 Tempest) to the ostentatious (Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, 1991) and the wonderfully bizarre (the sci-fi Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox and released in 1956) . The 1979 BBC/Time-Life production was directed by John Gorrie and saw Michael Hordern’s Prospero opposite Warren Clarke’s Caliban . In 2010 Julie Taymor followed her well-regarded Titus (see p .45) with a version of The Tempest, featuring grande dame Helen Mirren as a character intriguingly called Prospera .

Screen

The TempestPercy Stow (dir.) UK,�1908 > on�Silent�Shakespeare�(BFI)�d wThough not quite twelve minutes long, this silent Tempest from 1908 feels like a veritable odyssey, packing the play’s highlights and its backstory into a succession of swift-flowing scenes. Details of the cast have long since disappeared, and although its members share equal screen-time the elfin little girl playing Ariel and an exaggeratedly hirsute Caliban (shown munching on roots, Timon-style) especially catch the eye. It’s a charming version, made all the more appealing by its deft mixture of set-based footage and adventurous location shots (Ariel dances around a sun-dappled wood, Ferdinand literally clambers out of the sea), cinematography that comes together in one impressive split-screen shot in which Prospero is shown conjuring a real storm – with waves, pyrotechnics and a flock of real doves for good measure. It’s available on the BFI’s excellent Silent

Shakespeare anthology along with intriguing versions of Twelfth Night (see p.478), Richard III (see p.385) and Dream (see p.316).

Forbidden PlanetW. Pidgeon, A. Francis, L. Nielsen; Fred McLeod Wilcox (dir.) USA,�1956 > Warner�d�wEsoteric plotting, an improbable love story and sometimes impenetrable dialogue? That’s just the original. But this cult re-rendering of Shakespeare’s final solo riff has many of those features too, translating Prospero’s potent art into twenty-third-century sci-fi wizardry. We’re beamed down to the green-skied planet of Altair-4, where a scientific colony has long since lost contact with Earth. A military team headed by Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) heads into space to locate the problem, and ends up encountering the mysterious Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaria (Anne Francis) – not to mention their dutiful servant, Robby the Robot. The film’s borrowings from The Tempest pretty much halt there, though in its influential special effects