Ariel's Liberty

Julian Bleach's performance as Ariel in the 2006 RSC production of The Tempest (dir. Rupert Goold) surprised critics and audiences with its departure from performance tradition. This surprise is a site for exploring the ambiguity of Shakespeare's text when it comes to this role. Defined as a non-gendered "ayrie spirit" and with myriad contradictory descriptors, including bodilessness, the role leaves a large number of performance decisions up the actor. Bleach defines Ariel with a metronomic prowl, reluctant movements, and deep, nasal, otherworldly voicings of lines and songs. Simultaneously otherworldly and human, Bleach's portrayal of Ariel pressed on the questions of what it means to be male or female or neither, human or other-questions prompted any time a human actor embodies this nonhuman role. Highlighting Ariel's strangeness and capacity for empathy, Bleach's performance makes one question Prospero's moral superiority over his captives in new ways and throws Ariel's desire for liberty into relief. Bleach himself takes the liberties granted to him by Shakespeare's ambiguous text, and calls attention to the way the body may trump language when it comes to authoring meaning. Bleach's particular performance exposes the way in which a body on stage can both suggest the tried and true binaries of male and female, frightening and fearful, black and white, living and dead, enslaved and liberated, and break away from them, embodying the more uncomfortable realm which is none of these things.