Faithful to the Text - Except For That First Word

the tempest
canadian stage: shakespeare in high park
the national post

For some unfathomable reason, CanStage, mounting its annual open- air Shakespeare, has deprived The Tempest of its definite article. In the text itself it has made hardly any cuts, but the play -- Shakespeare's shortest apart from The Comedy of Errors -- still clocks in at just under two hours, sans intermission. There has been a fair amount of anxious modernizing of individual words, some of it reasonable, some of it downright neurotic.

The tinkering with the title may suggest that the director, Michael Shamata, intends to offer us a confessed adaptation of the play rather than the thing itself. In fact, he has provided a solid, conventional production that refuses to take off and that finds parts of the play absolutely intractable.

His Prospero is John Jarvis, with whom he worked happily the previous two summers in the equivalent pastoral set-up in Oakville. Jarvis is an excellent and lucid speaker of verse, and that is about the extent of what he gives us here. That is not in itself to be sneezed at; it gets him comprehensibly through the monstrous expository scene in which Prospero first tells his daughter Miranda all the things she doesn't know, then reminds Ariel of all the things they both know, and finally goads Caliban into recounting all the things that everybody currently on stage knows.

Anger and resentment, long pent-up, at the men who banished him and are now in his power, are the keynotes here, and they spill over. When he accuses Miranda of not listening, he seems to be taking out on her his feelings about his treacherous brother Antonio. That is fine as far as it goes, but this Prospero doesn't seem capable of anything else, and certainly not of being pleased or amused.

The performance becomes monochrome, and so in consequence does much of the play. Nor does it really pay off in its own terms; when Prospero renounces his revenge, the moment -- generally reckoned to be the climax of the play -- hardly registers. (What, I have sometimes wondered, did Prospero intend to do with his foes anyway? He never speaks of killing them. Did he intend to keep them wandering around his island in dazed perpetuity? And how would that square with his plans to marry his daughter to their leader's son?) And as for the great aria in which he surrenders his magic powers -- well, maybe William Hutt has spoiled us for hearing it from anybody else.

But then, this production has trouble with magic throughout. It greets the script's demands for spectacular effects grudgingly, as if it can't afford them and wishes they would go away. This especially applies to the set- pieces of the wedding masque and the phantom banquet, which here are meaningless.

One can sympathize with the desire to avoid any attempt at an ethereal Ariel; the part has been given to a tall actress, Tanja Jacobs, painted green like an alien in a science-fiction movie. She plays it neutrally, with no particular relationship to Prospero, loving or resentful or both, and with no especial yearning for freedom.

Also, it seems, she cannot sing, so her songs (mainly set as percussive madrigals) are relayed to us by a dubbed and presumably supernatural chorus. They seem to be done because they're in the text and nobody quite liked to cut them.

There are four other sprites who trip around in white robes, topped by protective headgear that makes them look like bee- keepers. Their choreography (Mark Christmann is credited as movement coach) is uniformly unfortunate: a series of jerky shuffles. At the "ding dong bell" refrain that concludes the "full fathom five" number, they sway rigidly from side to side, perhaps in an effort to suggest pendulums.

The clown scenes, though, are well thought out, with Brandon McGibbon's Caliban a sympathetic butt for Oliver Dennis' very funny and nasty Stephano and Patrick Galligan's fairly funny and timorous Trinculo. There is intelligence, too, in the handling of the courtiers who troop about the isle in modern formal dress, as if they had all been dining at the captain's table when the storm struck. (Presumably they were too much the gentlemen to put on life jackets.)

There are a few vivid pangs of conscience in Michael Spencer- Davis' Alonso, though I despair of ever seeing this role accorded its full traumatic force, and some pleasant puttering from Keith Knight as Gonzalo. The young attendant lord Adrian (Ross Ward), generally a nonentity, is given some freshness by being played as a precocious juvenile, on the lines of Moth in Love's Labour's Lost.

Alex Poch-Goldin's silkily villainous Antonio works very well on David Jansen's pliant Sebastian. In the last scene, where these two have very few lines, the differences between them are sharply drawn. Antonio remains pointedly outside the circle of reconciliation, even turns his back on it; Sebastian is initially drawn into it, but eventually relapses into the orbit of his evil genius.

These moments are isolated, though, and easy to miss. It would take a far more tightly focused production, maybe in a studio setting, to relate them to the whole. The lovers -- Manon St-Jules as Miranda, Todd Hofley as Ferdinand -- are agreeable, she especially.