Beam Me Up, Boatswain!
the tempest
the royal shakespeare company
the national post
Patrick Stewart's Prospero lives in an Arctic hut. That's the set-up for a sensational new production of The Tempest by the Royal Shakespeare Company that opened last year in Stratford-on-Avon, England, then formed part of a three play RSC residency at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (which is where I saw it), and is now playing at the Novello Theatre (formerly the Strand) in London. Somehow -- perhaps, as he himself suggests, by heavenly providence -- the rotten boat into which the magician's enemies consigned him when they threw him out of his Milanese dukedom fetched up amid the tundra. Years later, when he raises the tempest in The Tempest, his magical powers prove strong enough to blow those same enemies all the way from North Africa to the North Pole, or somewhere close.
In leading this classical contingent, Stewart returns to his roots. He was an RSC stalwart -- the kind of actor people call "reliable" -- for about two decades before his abrupt ascent to international fame as Captain Luc Picard, a role for which his aquiline authority made him a perfect, if unexpected, fit. He has come out the other end, not just an ex- Star Trekker but a full star presence, his Shakespearean skills not just intact but enhanced. His Prospero is a craggy, hairless seer (Stewart has been bald for as long as anyone can remember; even when young he was nobody's juvenile lead) who is angry and powerful but not, by current standards, especially bleak or bitter.
He may hound and despise his foes but his ruling passion is his love for his daughter, Miranda, an affection wrinkled with humour. Many actors have raised laughs from Prospero's obsessive injunctions to Ferdinand, Miranda's betrothed, to honour her chastity until marriage. Stewart conveys that, though he means every word of it, he is also laughing at himself, at his own inability to leave it alone. He trusts them just far enough to assign them separate bunk beds in what the text calls his cell. He has done it up well, and one notes that he has been able to provide climate-appropriate clothing; Maria Gale's enchantingly impetuous Miranda wears a woolly bonnet, a heavy coat made out of multi-coloured scraps and a clumping pair of jackboots. Maybe her dad had Ariel and his other spirits run them up cheap.
Rupert Goold, a young director mounting his first RSC Shakespeare, has done the most important thing possible for any play; he has created a world, a breathtaking one. The set, designed by Giles Cadle, has as its signature device a traverse curtain that continually wipes away one icy vista and replace it with another; the "barren island" has never seemed bleaker or more specific. The sense of place is an enormous stimulus to the actors, and especially to the shipwrecked courtiers whose scenes, so often tedious, are here gripping and even witty.
On their way home to Italy from celebrating a royal marriage in Tunis, they look as if they had been travelling first-class on the Titanic and were tempest-tossed while half-way through dinner. So they come ashore wearing Eddie Bauer life jackets over their evening clothes. This makes them look incongruous but also dangerous. The barbed banter of the corrupt Sebastian and Antonio is not only comprehensible but viciously funny. Meanwhile, their victim, the virtuous and garrulous Gonzalo (James Hayes), has his stature enhanced; his Utopian vision of the island transformed manages to seem both absurd and impressive, and the same goes for his speech of blessing in the last scene. Meanwhile, the irredeemable Antonio (Ken Bones) grows ever more impassive; physically he resembles his brother Prospero (he's bald too), and it's a blistering irony that when Miranda discovers the "brave new world" of men, it's her uncle, so like but unlike her father, whom she first salutes.
The court party has earlier been exposed to one of the most stunning effects I have ever seen. The phantom banquet that tantalizes the weary and famished travellers here takes the form of a giant seal, drawn in on a sled. They slice it open, and start tearing out pieces of bloody blubber.
As they begin to eat, out of the belly of the beast there springs up a harpy Ariel (Julian Beach) who, even in his earlier unwinged state, is as far removed as possible from the traditional balletic sprite: He is tall, gaunt and flour-faced; he moves with the deliberation of Frankenstein's monster, and his voice is a minatory croak. He is authentically other-worldly, but though technically inhuman, he can reach out towards feelings. It's as important here that Ariel should beg mercy for Prospero's victims as that Prospero should grant it. Their parting when Ariel claims his freedom is uncommonly moving. The goddesses' wedding masque becomes an Inuit fertility rite; the clown scenes aren't very inventive, but they do maintain the play's power dynamics, as between a rather lightweight Caliban and the two sots he's unwise enough to worship. The production's end is a powerful fusion of harmony and discord; as Stewart's Prospero prepares to return to civilian life, his cell splits apart and, instead of merely breaking his magic staff, he hurls it into the ruins where it catches fire and explodes.
The Tempest is extraordinary, but the RSC's other two productions, Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, also won very favourable response from the Ann Arbor audience. These were the kind of alert, responsive houses that actors rise to. The RSC, which everyone in England was recently giving up for dead, has spectacularly bounced back.