The National's Great Tempest
The Tempest
The National Theatre
The Observer
There is only one word to describe The Tempest, Peter Hall’s first production for the National Theatre, and for once it can be employed literally. The word is fabulous.
Fabulous, but not by any means fanciful: Mr Hall’s approach is, by the lights of this play, scrupulously realistic. He begins with a thoroughly convincing storm, the hard-working, hard-lurching sailors beset by a bunch of troublesome courtiers scrambling up from a cabin below decks. At the close of the scene the roof of their cabin slams shut; standing on it, the first of a series of inspired transformations, is Prospero, the controller of the tempest and of the play.
His control is not, in John Gielgud’s performance, serene or untroubled. To work magic on this scale requires of him an enormous effort of concentration; his magician’s robe weighs him down and it is a relief to have him shed it. He lays great stress on the line about ‘the most auspicious star’ on whose influence necessarily transient, his success depends. This Prospero is engaged in a race against time and this awareness colours the whole of his dispute with Ariel, whose demand for his liberty ‘before the time be out’ endangers the whole scheme.
As it turns out it is only when the scheme is successful that Prospero’s real troubles start. For the time being his charms work like a charm. The responsibility for showing this is not the actor’s (since Prospero has a habit of not being around while his spells are operating), but the director’s, and Mr Hall shirks none of it. Some of his coups-de-theatre are truly coups of grace: the appearance of Ariel as a water-nymph when we expect the lumbering entrance of Caliban (I know the play by heart and this moment still took my by surprise so cunningly it is staged) and the arrival of Ferdinand on the spot where Caliban had stood only a second before.
This last trick is effected with the aid of sliding scenery. One of the prime qualities of the isle, as realized by John Bury, is its mobility: a theatrical delight, to be relished as such. The masque element in the production erupts in two set pieces: the vanishing banquet, borne by ‘strange shapes’ like a bad baroque dream of fertility corrupted, and the show of goddesses, sung throughout (which I found excessive, but pardonable) with Iris perched aloft, somewhere under a rainbow.
All of these wonders are germane to the play; most of them are explicitly demanded by it, though few directors respond as generously as Mr Hall. His triumph in this vein is his treatment of Ariel; ‘an airy spirit’ he apparently lives in the sky (I said that this was a literal-minded productions) whence he regularly descends by pulley. (I came to think of this contraption as Ariel’s aerial.) Nearly always he is in some disguise; by his constant changes of shape Michael Feast comes as close to incorporeality as can be asked of any actor. He has besides two voices (which makes him as Stephano remarks in another context, ‘a most delicate monster;); he sings both tenor and counter-tenor, rendering in the latter the lovely original setting of ‘Full fathom five.’
‘But this rough magic I here abjure’; the effects can only furnish the groundwork of the play, and in the end everything depends on Gielgud. Approaching victory he approaches despair: ‘Our revels now are ended’ is savage rather than lyrics. His renunciation of recent is tremendous, though not marked by any weighty pause. His tormented outburst against the ‘born devil’ Caliban is balanced at the end by a glimmering of tolerance; a tolerance more than deserved since Denis Quilley’s Caliban, though resembling a Hiawatha who has gone berserk with the tomahawk and scalped himself, yet contrives to appear attractive. His roar of ‘freedom’ has amazing force (in every performance of Mr Quilley’s there is on moment that makes me think him the most exciting actor in the world and this is it), so his abasement for Stephano is all the most poignant. Arthur Lowe’s Stephano is as funny as you would expect and more than twice as mean; his function in the play is brilliantly illuminated at his final appearance in his stolen regal robes, to be greeted by Prospero’s wry ‘You’d be king of the isle, sirrah?’ Suddenly the stage appears thronged with monarchs, true and false; not for nothing do mirrors feature heavily in Mr Bury’s set.
One parallel stands out over all; in his ducal gown Prospero is a dead ringer for his usurping brother Antonio, who emerges, far more than Caliban, as the play’s negative pole. The role has been unusually strongly cast with an actor, Cyril Cusack, who approximates Gielgud’s own stature; untouched by the forgiveness at the close (though when Miranda appears he looks as though he might be harbouring avuncular thoughts of rape), he breaks silence only to make a sour joke over Caliban. One glance between the brothers as the end establishes them as eternally unreconcilable.
Having absorbed both this blow and his effective desertion by Ariel (who, having finally gained his freedom, celebrates by taking an express lift upstairs), Gielgud speaks the Epilogue, and sets his seal on the role forever. His next appearance (in Edward Bond’s Bingo) will be as Shakespeare himself. It seems logical.
A magnificent event: not however, a flawless one. The flaws are important, less for the harm they do to this play (which easily survives them) than for the future of the company. On this showing there is no company; despite the trendy and prestigious casting the remarkable performances are outnumbered (not outweighed) by the mediocre ones. The lovers are conventional; Jenny Agutter, in virtually her first stage role, does little more than obey orders. The courtiers (even Mr Cusack) are pallid; one of the play’s crucial moments- Alonso’s first access of guilt- goes, in Joseph O’Conor’s amiable hands, for nothing.