The Tempest

Synopsis

Prospero, Duke of Milan, his dukedom usurped by his brother Antonio, is put to sea with his daughter Miranda and some magical books smuggled in by his loyal councillor Gonzalo. The sea casts them up on an island where Prospero, exercising his magical powers, makes a home for himself and Miranda. One day a great storm, which Prospero has conjured, breaks up a passing ship and delivers to him the members of his usurping court. Treacherous brother, fellow conspirators and old friend alike come under Prospero's spell. Shakespeare's last play.

Our Review:

1 March 2007

Most modern productions of this play tend to see it as either a text about colonialism or as a treatise on nature and illusion. Rupert Goold’s dark production seems to come from another place altogether. His Paradise Lost last year suggested that here was a startlingly original director and here, together with designer Giles Cadle, he’s a created a strange and unsettling world: half gothic nightmare and half Nordic myth.

The opening storm scene is one of the best I’ve seen - I was almost feeling seasick myself – and we’re quickly transported not to a tropical island but to a frozen wasteland (and let’s skip over how a ship sailing from Tunis to Naples appears to have ended up in the Bering Sea).

We first see Patrick Stewart’s Prospero as a shamanic figure calling up the storm, but it’s soon apparent this is no tyrannical figure. In one instance, here he’s more pedagogic: his explanation to Miranda of who she is seems more like a school lesson. He tenderly prepa...

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Latest User Review

Janet Polson - 22 March 2007:

Anyone having preconceived ideas about the location of Prospero's magic island should forget them before going to see this latest RSC production of the play, directed by Rupert Goold. Hints that we might not be going to visit the more usual Mediterranean island were contained in the map on the curtain hiding the stage before the show, which actually depicted the Arctic, and, when we eventually saw Prospero's home, it was a weather-beaten log cabin situated amidst the seemingly limitless frozen wastes of Giles Cadle's superb set - a brilliant exercise in perspective. Purists may cringe in horror, or pedants complain that a ship journeying from Africa to Italy is unlikely to end up in the Bering Strait, but there is no need to. The unusual location did no disservice whatsoever to the play – indeed in some respects it cast a new and fascinating light on it – and we were, after all, seeing not only a magic island but also a storm that, conjured up as it was by Ariel at Prospero's bidding, could well have had unusual effects! Even before this truly unique setting for the piece was revealed, we had seen as exciting a version of the storm scene as I have witnessed in nine productions. Painted on the curtain along with the map was a large ship's radio, and the show began with a shipping forecast (in true BBC style) which reported the approaching storm. And we scarcely had time to marvel at the dazzling – and greatly daring – ingenuity of this before the radio's speaker was transformed into the porthole of the ship, revealing the mariners being tossed around on the bridge and the invasions of the frightened passengers, who were in evening dress. There was much more to this production, though, than a stunning design and an exciting staging, for these were combined with fine performances. Mariah Gale gave Miranda exactly the combination of innocence and gawkiness you would expect in a girl of her age who had been brought up in isolation from the world, Ken Bones was as chilling and unrepentant an Antonio as you will ever see and Finbar Lynch's Alonso was so engrossed by his grief over the apparent loss of Ferdinand that he spent much of the play oblivious both to what was happening around him and the extreme harshness of his environment. The most outstanding portrayals, however, were those of Julian Bleach, as a white-faced Gothic spirit, clothed in black, who might well have come from the underworld rather than the air above and of whom even Prospero was at times a little afraid, and Patrick Stewart as Prospero himself, whose arduous exile seemed to have caused him to become so eaten up by his desire for revenge that, after he had achieved it, he seemed to lose all his self-belief and who, after he had spoken the play's closing words, still held us in thrall with an almost unbearably long, and silent, appeal for our support. ...

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