The Tempest (review)

It is a commonplace of criticism to point out that The Tempest is more poetic than dramatic. Certainly the play is rather lacking in dramatic tension: Prospero’s interruption of the romance plot is by his own design and both short-lived and mild; neither Caliban’s plot against Prospero nor Sebastian and Antonio’s plot against Alonso goes very far and each is easily thwarted by Ariel and Prospero. It is therefore no surprise to see that, as a recent issue of Shakespeare Bulletin (29.3) devoted to contemporary productions of The Tempest attests, the play in production across the globe generally involves a prominent concept or spectacular production features. It appears that, even as the focus has shifted to some degree away from colonialism, new ways of adapting the play’s political conflicts to contemporary contexts continue to be explored; at the same time, a return to treating the aesthetics of Prospero’s vision (or “art) often seems to be accompanied by more insistent borrowings from the techniques of cinema. Perhaps The Enchanted Island—the 2011 operatic re-adaptation of Dryden’s adaptation by Jeremy Sams for the Metropolitan Opera—exemplifies the continuing effort to reinvent The Tempest for the stage. With continual projections faintly reminiscent of Prospero’s Books onto a scrim that is behind an already opulent set, the opera is visually stunning. To add more fun and intrigue to the romance line, the lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream enter the story, via a shipwreck, and set off a series of madcap confusions which even involves a brief romance between Caliban and Helena; Syrcorax assumes a central role that complicates the romance line (she is the spurned lover of Prospero) while providing more emotional heft to the politics of conquest and resistance (though the energy of resistance ultimately gets dissipated, or as it used to be said, contained). Though the opera is conceived musically as a pastiche of existing baroque compositions, it might also be considered a pastiche of efforts made from the time of Dryden to the present to add dramatic tension to The Tempest.

The Actors from the London Stage Tempest was the antithesis of so many contemporary productions. As is customary for this traveling company, the production was as stripped down as it could be, with props and scenery confined to what could be carried in a suitcase. Though the production clearly had a vision, it was not what one would normally term a concept. Yet this Tempest brought more urgency to the story than I have ever seen on stage. Much of this had to do with how Dale Rapley played Prospero. As he explained to me after one performance, he was guided by the repetition of the word “Now” in the play, especially in Prospero’s lines. For him the word charted Prospero’s journey through the play and indicated the intense pressure Prospero feels to achieve his project within the narrow moment that fortune and “a most auspicious star” miraculously provided. The momentum began with “The hour’s now come” and continued with Fortune bringing “now” his enemies to his shores and making the “time twixt six and now” so urgent. One could continue at length in this exercise; suffice it to point out that key moments in the play can be marked by the following clauses: “They now are in my power,” “Our revels now are ended,” “Now does my project gather to a head,” and “Now my charms are all o’erthrown.” The emotional urgency that Rapley injected into his role gave the production itself an urgency and therefore a pace that was highly unusual for this play. The play acquired, one might say, a tempestuous quality, as Prospero’s emotional drama—his quest to achieve some form of reconciliation, harmony, perhaps simply control, or even revenge—exploded on...