The Tempest (22 page)

When Gonzalo talks about the “golden age” and how he would govern the isle, he is teased by the other characters. Do you think it’s essential that he should be regarded by the audience as a man of great dignity, a kind of moral center, or can we share in the mockery?

Brook:
Gonzalo: Always in Shakespeare opposites coexist. The man of peace has an ideal, it needs to be felt as real—and at the same time he is completely out of touch with reality. So he’s both touching and comic, like so many well-meaning dreamers.

Mendes:
I think as always with a Shakespeare play that both are true. At times he’s a boring old buffoon. Yet he’s a very, very kind man who has saved Prospero. I think it’s dangerous to make him merely one or the other. In that respect it’s a three-dimensional portrait.

Goold:
Both, surely. The jokes are funny and should be, as should Gonzalo’s optimism in the face of catastrophe, but I think his handling of Alonso in particular shows a very shrewd and sensitive man.

Conversely, are Stephano and Trinculo just drunken clowns, or is there more to their role in the drama?

Brook:
Stephano, Trinculo, and the plot to murder Prospero are a vital part of the dark underworld of the play which must be there to balance its fun, charm, and lightness.

Mendes:
I think Jan Kott [in his classic study
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
] makes the point that they are a distorted version of the central story of the play. They play out a vaudevillian version of the king-making central plot. You get a sense of the subplot echoing the main plot, parodying those other characters. It also allows us to review the central plot, when we return to it, with greater clarity. So their purpose in the play is important. If you took them out of the play it would actually destroy it, because what they do in unlocking Caliban and making him aware of the “glories of drink” has a lot to do with one’s understanding of the nature of master–servant relationships and what “freedom” means.

With the subject, I tried to push that sense in which no one is ever fully able to control their subjects a little further. I made Trinculo (played by David Bradley) into a ventriloquist with a dummy dressed exactly like he was. When Ariel possesses Trinculo and makes him speak with Prospero’s voice he possessed his ventriloquist’s dummy instead. So again there was another version of the master unable to control his subject or the director unable to control his actors theme. We explored that to great length, particularly with Ariel. How nobody is a willing subject. Ultimately there is no such thing as a person who doesn’t want on some level to control their own life and therefore to hold power. In that respect, going back to your earlier question, Gonzalo becomes a sort of a hero because he’s the only person in the play who is willingly a subject.

Goold:
The clowns are very hard because they arrive so late and the gabardine sequence is so bloody difficult and so vaudeville. However,
their second scene is, I think, the best in the play. The way the violence shifts between them and infects Caliban is extraordinarily rich. We always called it the “Jamie Bulger” scene as the horrifying scenario of two bullying infant thugs leading a confused Caliban on a journey of violence seemed very familiar.

The text is explicit that Miranda is fifteen years old: what were the consequences of that for your production?

Brook:
We looked for the youngest girls we could find—in the end we had two of roughly the right age.

Mendes:
I wanted someone who had a little bit more stage presence. When you are on a big stage, casting someone who is genuinely a girl doesn’t always work. I think traditionally Mirandas fall into two categories: the tomboy Miranda who has taken after her father because the only thing she has ever known is the company of men; and the more feminine Miranda whose burgeoning sexuality is something that Prospero is increasingly mystified by but keenly feels the approach of.

The sexual jealousy of Prospero, and the tension between his wanting to give Miranda to Ferdinand and his wanting to retain her, is actually one of the best reasons to cast her at the age that she is supposed to be, and that may be one reason why Shakespeare is so explicit about her age. But I went for somebody who was already moving toward womanhood and had left her father behind, partly because I was interested in working with Sarah Woodward again, who could carry off some of the stridency of the role without losing sympathy. Also partly because Sarah makes me laugh and I think Miranda is actually a very funny part. She has the biggest laugh of the evening with “O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here!”

Goold:
We looked at what happens to girls who are brought up by their fathers alone. In the eighties there was a rash of girl prodigies, taught by ambitious fathers at home, going to Oxford at about the same age who all were hugely developed intellectually but retarded socially and sexually. We brought a child psychologist in who guided us on this but perhaps the greatest question any actor must answer
is what has happened in the claimed rape story with Caliban. We developed quite a complex backstory around Miranda’s first menstruation, and both Caliban and Prospero’s response to it, to create a terrible event that all three of them had no real understanding of or ability to deal with.

What did your production infer from Antonio’s silence in the face of Prospero’s forgiveness of him?

Brook:
Quite rightly, he had nothing to say.

Mendes:
He was unforgiven and unforgiving. The production had an unresolved, ambivalent ending on all fronts. There was nothing that went exactly as Prospero had planned it.

Goold:
That the feeling was not mutual. Of course it can be played as an expression of guilt but our whole approach to Act 5 was one of bathos. Prospero expects a great reconciliation but most of the lords treat him with a suspicion and hostility that is only interrupted by Miranda, Ferdinand, and the clowns. We played all of Act 5 as a messy, frustrating failure for Prospero, partly because we wanted to present the epilogue in as bleak and desolate a way as possible. A man with no answers, friends, or powers. As such, a brother whose hatred is still explicit seemed the most useful.

John Gielgud said that the one thing he did consistently as Prospero in the four different productions in which he played the part over more than forty years was never to look Ariel directly in the face. With what sort of emotions did Prospero and Ariel part from each other in your production?

Brook:
John Gielgud made history at the time by playing Prospero clean-shaven. He also showed his violent anger. The play is called
The Tempest
not because of a noisy first scene, but because peace and calm, inner and outer only come at the very end when Prospero has managed to overcome his anger, his wish for revenge and his need for power. Until then, deep in his nature he remains Antonio’s blood brother—the tempest is everywhere. As for emotions, the question is absurd. You don’t define them, you play them.

5.
Prospero (John Gielgud) in command over a cowering Ariel (Brian Bedford) in Peter Brook’s production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1957.

Mendes:
When Ariel was finally released he vented his spleen on Prospero and famously, I suppose now, spat in his face. That was the most controversial aspect of the production, but it felt absolutely earned and justified in his reading of the role. It was quite exciting to be in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and to have people shout out. I watched a performance and two people shouted
out “Rubbish!” when he spat in his face. I rather liked it. It was an electric moment and it suddenly made you pity Prospero in a way that nothing else in the evening could have made you do. Suddenly he was the one who was lost. He has lost his powers and when he says, “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own, / Which is most faint,” it really meant something. He was talking in the moment. It didn’t seem preplanned. It seemed a response to what Ariel had just done to him. So to me that was a thrilling discovery. But it was entirely, as is often the case, due to a particular journey that I as the director and a group of actors had gone on. If I tried to impose it on another production, it wouldn’t work at all. It was an organic thing that emerged out of rehearsals.

Goold:
Ariel only of release, a deep single sob of relief and annihilation. Prospero of confusion and sentiment—as one might release a treasured pet into the wild, hoping that he will look back but not really expecting it. This is all linked to the Act 5 reading I’ve outlined. Our Prospero wanted closure—with Miranda, Antonio, his magic, the island even—but life cannot be nicely stage-managed in the way he had hoped and once emotions were let in the ordered ending he had planned was in ruins.

What do you think was the hardest choice you had to make in creating your production of the play?

Brook:
I can never understand this word “choice,” which recurs constantly in Actor’s Studio jargon. You certainly have to work hard and then in the end the choices make themselves by themselves.

Mendes:
I think what is most difficult is how to realize the spiritual world. Unless you have a specific literal setting for the play, you have to render the spiritual world in a way that is convincing for a modern audience and feels real. The specter of people in lycra with floaty pastel colors and net curtains rushing around pretending to be fairies is the thing that haunted me and I wanted to avoid. But that is also the reason that you do it. You do it because you don’t have the answers to everything and because you are scared by the play and how impossible it appears. Those are the things that draw you to it. That’s why I do what I do.

6.
Kananu Kirimi in Michael Boyd’s production.

7.
Julian Bleach as Ariel in Rupert Goold’s Arctic-set 2006 RSC production, designed by Giles Cadle, with costumes by Nicky Gillibrand.