Authors: William Shakespeare
When researching the part of Caliban for the RSC’s 1978 production, David Suchet made a startling discovery:
Imagine my horror when I discovered that Caliban had been played as: (1) a fish, (2) a dog with one and/or two heads, (3) a lizard, (4) a monkey, (5) a snake, (6) half-ape, half-man, with fins for arms, (7) a tortoise. These were just a few of the extreme interpretations. I, once again, began to feel rather depressed but I did manage a smile when I read that, when Caliban had been portrayed as a tortoise, Prospero would turn him on his back when he became unruly.
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Ariel and Caliban have been adapted to fit a multitude of different physical representations. The stage relationship between Prospero and these amorphous creatures has driven, and been driven by, twentieth-century critical interpretations of the play, whether it be Darwinian, Freudian, or colonial. The outdated Darwinian reading that Suchet hints at above has all but become extinct. However, Freudian interpretations continue, presenting Ariel and Caliban as elementals conjured from Prospero’s subconscious. In Adrian Noble’s 1998 production this was indicated through costume design:
Scott Handy’s sweet-voiced Ariel and Robert Glenister’s anguished Caliban look like positive and negative photographic images of each other, both dressed in unflattering loin cloths, the one covered in white body-paint, the other in black slime.
There is the suggestion that they are different aspects of Prospero’s psyche, the super ego and the id perhaps.
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In many productions the costumes of Ariel and Caliban are designed to link in with Prospero’s own attire. In one sense, there is the practical idea of Prospero clothing the natives to so-called civilized standards with his castoffs. But, for the audience it creates a physical and psychological link between the characters, where “in its most reductive form, Ariel is his superego, [and] Caliban his libido.”
To increase the dramatic tension in the play, the majority of productions performed in the last fifty years have chosen to have a male actor play Ariel. “From the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth, the part of Ariel was a coveted female role … the cultural significance of gender and changing attitudes toward the power relationships in the play”
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account for this shift in casting. Subjecting one man to the servitude of another automatically creates a tension, a power struggle that results in resentful servitude. Prospero, as a result, becomes an isolated figure, constantly at odds with those who wish him to relinquish his power over them. In the 1993 production Alec McCowen’s Prospero could not
afford to be complacent. Although he succeeds in controlling his world, his magic needs to be “rough” because in addition to a thuggish Ariel, he has to control a terrifying Caliban and an unusually outspoken daughter. His wand doubles as a stick.
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In the first half of the twentieth century it was still common to portray Ariel and Caliban as the antithesis of each other, opposites in size, sex, attitude, and color—Ariel as loyal female, a white creature of the air, happy to please her master; Caliban as resentful subversive male, dark and earthy. The casting of men in these roles encouraged a parallel between Ariel and Caliban and their relationship with Prospero.
In the past fifty years the portrayal of Caliban evolved from a comic grotesque characterization of a missing link, to the “noble savage.” David Suchet was memorable as Caliban in 1978 when he played the role sympathetically:
Modern convention dictates that Caliban must be a sympathetic emblem of imperialistic exploitation, and that is how he is played here: a noble black innocent of magnificent physique speaking the language with the too-perfect precision of an alien.
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In Suchet’s words, “the monster was in the eyes of the beholder.”
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Caliban’s monstrosity was not attributed to deformity or from being an animalistic hybrid, but centered on his “otherness.”
We must look seriously at how we in the western world perceive the “other”—how we relate to it and how we talk about it in terms of ourselves. The whole sense of Caliban being taught language is cultural. Caliban is “the other” and Prospero has power over him through language.
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Caliban’s otherness is often represented by his color. In Michael Boyd’s 2002 production, Geff Francis was the first black actor to play the part on the RSC’s main stage
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(previously, white actors had blacked-up when they tackled the part). This reading of Caliban confronted the issue of colonialism and race head-on:
His gabardine is an impressive garment, suggesting the rather worn cloak of a tribal chieftain very much in keeping with the production’s emphasis on his dispossession.
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Boyd makes sure that we spot the colonial problems that arise in this exotic realm. Malcolm Storry’s white sweaty Prospero is domineering towards Kananu Kirimi’s black, implicitly abused Ariel while Geff Francis’s cruelly enslaved (and also black) Caliban pointedly cries more than once, “This island’s mine.” The ex-pat Europeans can certainly seem less civilised than the natives, as Simon Gregor’s upstart Trinculo makes entertainingly clear, reeling around like a drunk chimpanzee.
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The casting in this production of
The Tempest
pulled together a multitude of threads and issues that have dominated the portrayal of these characters for the last century. Kananu Kirimi was the first
woman to play Ariel on the main stage at Stratford since 1952. In 1970 and in 1988 the director Jonathan Miller used black actors in the parts, but this production, which cast a black actress as Ariel, opened up a “chance to explore parallels between colonisation of blacks by whites and of women by men.”
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Caliban and Ariel were described as “Caribbeans, seduced and exploited by Malcolm Storry’s commanding Prospero.”
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It brought to
The Tempest
the politics of gender and race prevalent in contemporary criticism:
Throughout, the production shows how the urge to power can turn a paradise into a hell. In his harness and metal slave collar, Geff Francis’s dignified and moving Caliban (who speaks the most haunting poetry in the play) is clearly a man more sinned against than sinning, and at the end, as Prospero begs the audience to set him free, the manacled Caliban remains, like a lingering rebuke to his cruel master.
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At the end of the play Prospero acknowledges responsibility for the damage he has done. Frankenstein-like, his rejection of this prodigious being as “human” and his subsequent neglect awakens the “monster” in Caliban. Instead of nurturing what he doesn’t understand, and raising Caliban as he would his own child, he identifies him as something “other.” Prospero’s harsh treatment breeds resentment, anger, outrage, and frustration to such a degree that Caliban plots his murder—avenging the man who usurped him as ruler of the isle.
In Sam Mendes’ 1993 production, Ariel’s vitriol was equal to Caliban’s. His dominant command of the island’s magic weakened Alec McCowen’s impact as Prospero, and made Ariel the more imposing figure:
In our production we had a very interesting portrayal of Ariel. Simon Russell Beale doesn’t really look like an “airy spirit”: he was more of an equal, which made Prospero’s impatience and fury with him all the more justified and understandable. I think when Prospero screams and shouts at an Ariel played by a wispy little (sometimes feminine) person or a child, it makes him appear impossibly bullying.
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The watchful stillness of Simon Russell Beale’s blue, Mao-suited Ariel holds the dangerous tension of a coiled spring as its energy is about to be liberated; the ticking of a time-bomb whose moment is about to come. Held by silken bonds of gratitude and the exercise of a power different from, but no greater than, his own, he performs the tasks Prospero sets him with meticulous ease and a hint of contempt at their largely trumpery nature.
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The positioning of this Ariel at the center of the stage in the first scene, controlling the magic of Prospero’s storm, was unusual. His power was depicted as equal to Prospero’s, leading to a very strained tension between master and servant. Reviewers talk of Ariel’s barely concealed hatred.
Prospero’s last action is the release of Ariel. This moment can express a close, friendly relationship between master and servant. But it can also convey Ariel’s impatience at the prospect of his liberty. Thus, Mark Rylance’s Ariel had already gone when Prospero spoke the words that were supposed to release him. Sam Mendes offered a startling revision of the entire relationship between Prospero and Ariel. The previously unemotional, efficient servant turned to Prospero and, spitting in his face, released the hatred and disgust accumulated during the twelve years of his servitude. The subsequent epilogue for Alec McCowen became the painful, weary recognition of his project’s failure and a true prayer for pardon and relief from the “good hands” of the audience.
The Tempest
seems to be inexhaustible. Clifford Williams’ pessimistic view of the play was criticized in 1963, but prefigured interpretations to come:
In this play Shakespeare includes all the themes from his earlier work—kingship, inheritance, treachery, conscience, identity, love, music, God; he draws them together as if to find the key to it all, but there is no such key. There is no grand order and Prospero returns to Milan not bathed in tranquillity, but a wreck.
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For Sam Mendes, “
The Tempest
is, among other things about politics in a profound sense: moral and social order in human society. Who commands and why? Who obeys and why?”
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“In [Michael] Boyd’s hands, this movingly becomes a play about the acquisition of grace and self-knowledge.”
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David Thacker believes that “
The Tempest
is an autobiographical play … in which Shakespeare is dealing with the nature of his artistic achievement and the need to give up writing.”
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To James McDonald,
It’s a tempest of the mind … shaped by people getting rid of extremes of emotion of grief and madness. And from that, rebirth can come.… [It] is about a number of huge opposites: drowning and rebirth, freedom and slavery, revenge and forgiveness, nature and nurture, sleeping and waking, seeming and being. An issue like colonialism is in there, but it’s not all that the play’s about.… Prospero … has to learn to forgive people for the wrongs they have done. And that’s a very difficult thing to do.
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Peter Brook
is the most revered director of the second half of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Born in 1925, he first directed at Stratford in 1947. His work has been influenced by a range of approaches from Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theater” to Indian and African notions of storytelling;
The Empty Space
, his book of 1968, remains the best introduction to his art. Following his groundbreaking 1970 “white box and circus skills”
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
at Stratford, he moved to Paris and founded his International Centre for Theatre Research. He continued to produce innovative work at his intimate Bouffes du Nord Theatre well into his eighties. He has directed
The Tempest
no fewer than four times: in 1957, with John Gielgud as Prospero, again in 1963 and 1968, then in 1990 with his company of international actors at the Bouffes. In this interview, he speaks mostly about the last of these productions.
Sam Mendes
was born in 1965 and began directing classic drama both for the RSC and on the West End stage soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was artistic director of the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London. His first movie,
American Beauty
(1999), won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. His 1993 RSC production of
The Tempest
, which he talks about here, featured Alec McCowen as Prospero and Simon Russell Beale as Ariel.
Rupert Goold
was born in 1977. He studied at Cambridge and was an assistant director at the Donmar under Mendes. After undertaking a range of experimental work, he directed two highly acclaimed Shakespearean productions with the veteran stage and television actor Patrick Stewart:
The Tempest
of 2006, which he talks about here, part of the RSC’s year-long Complete Works Festival, and an intimate
Macbeth
in 2007 at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, with a transfer to London’s West End.
The storm offers a spectacular opening to the play. How did you approach it from a design point of view?
Brook:
The first scene of
The Tempest
needs to be a beginning, leading one into the story. If it becomes a show in itself, the play cannot survive. Once, I staged it experimentally around a swinging plank, covered with bricks, with a model galleon in the middle. The actors stood behind and played the text—for once every word was heard! Then Prospero took a brick and smashed the ship. At once, Miranda cried out her protest and the story began. Then, when we did the play at the Bouffes, Ariel carried the model boat on his head, rocking a long tube full of pebbles to evoke the sound of waves as it was rocked and the actors held sticks to suggest the movements of the sea. This led straight into the scene between Prospero and Miranda—and the audience wanted to know more.
Mendes:
The way I approached the storm was tied into my whole approach to the play. I would say that my production explored the play along lines that, crudely put, see Prospero as a director and his subjects as actors, and the journey of the play as an enactment created by Prospero in an empty space in order to lead to what he hopes
will be ultimate resolution. My sense of the production now is that it was what I would call a young man’s vision of the play. It was full of ideas and probably quite imaginative but not entirely rigorous in its thought process! It’s a play that I’d love to do again and would now do quite differently.