The Tempest: Re-imagined for everyone aged six and over (review)

For a second time, the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park opted to stage a Shakespeare play as its annual children's production. Yet, unlike the first production, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Liam Steel choose to adapt the less immediately child-friendly The Tempest. Steel's production successfully re-imagined the play for a young audience, without becoming reductive or diminishing the play's poetry, by combining audience involvement with a prologue, child-oriented embellishments such as puppets, and the physically expressive performances of the roles of Caliban and Ariel. By desexualizing the romantic sub-plot and foregrounding Ariel and his cohort of sprites, Steel's directorial approach emphasized both the fantastical and the comic features of the play over its more somber, tragic notes, producing an energetic and imaginative fairytale.

To prepare the production's younger audience for the complexities of Shakespeare's story and the doubling of the actors, Sarah Gordon's (Education Director) prologue established the political back-story of the play: Prospero and Miranda's shipwreck on the island, and how Caliban became dispossessed of the island. Key phrases from act one (e.g. Caliban's "This island's mine," Prospero's "Knowing I loved my books," etc.) were sprinkled throughout the prologue as a preview of scenes to come. Yet the prologue also established this production as a memory, woven by a group of sprites, in celebration of the day Prospero granted their freedom. The heavy emphasis on narrating back-story in 1.2 and 2.1 of Shakespeare's text was relieved to some extent by Gordon's prologue. Director Steel's fairytale/fairies' tale concept was also introduced in the prologue as the sprites became actors playing "dress-up" and introducing the roles they would perform: a corset and the bones of a hoop skirt, the audience was informed, identified Miranda, a teal carbuncled staff designated Prospero. The beige base-clothing that the actors wore allowed for easy character transformations through the addition or subtraction of symbolic accoutrements. The visual motif of playing dress-up was repeated during the attempted murder of Alonso as the fairies assembled a mannequin stand-in for the King, crowning the dummy and dressing it in the King's clothes, tempering this moment of violence for a young audience by moving it firmly away from realism.

Through the doubling of actors—an energetic fairy played the role of a boatswain in the opening scene and then transformed into the naïve Miranda and finally the treacherous Antonio—Steel amplified the fantastic elements of The Tempest. Placing the fairies at the forefront of this production, Steel often staged Ariel or other fairies overlooking the main action of the play, and treated them as additional, fully involved central characters similar to those in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The boundaries of this play-within-a-play were blurred further as the sprites rehearsed with the audience its collective "role" in creating the fiction of the production. We, the audience, were to perform the sound effects for the opening storm. Upon entering the Open Air Theatre at Regent's Park, patrons collected ribbons designating their fairy roles: "Ye elves of groves," "Ye elves of brooks." As the opening scene approached, the audience was tutored in how to perform its part in the production. For the sound of the crashing waves the "elves of brooks" were prompted to make "whooshing" noises, while the "elves of groves" beat their knees to simulate hail. Later, the audience provided the whooping and barking as it drove Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban off-stage at the end of 4.1. The audience-as...