Abstract
In the late summer/fall of 1988, four productions of The Tempest were on view virtually at the same time in England: Sir Peter Hall’s at the National Theatre, with Michael Bryant as Prospero; Jonathan Miller’s at the Old Vic, with Max von Sydow; Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl company, with Timothy Walker; and Nicholas Hytner’s for the RSC, with John Wood. These productions, all of a high order, show The Tempest as remaining in the inner repertory of Shakespeare, that part of the canon most charged with meaning today. But there is no single aspect of these productions that calls attention to itself as new, as radically changed from the recent past. Stage history can evolve through a striking new production that changes our perception of the play — Peter Brook’s King Lear (RSC, 1962), say, or Peter Hall’s Henry V (RSC, 1964). More often though meanings will change gradually over the years, with no outstanding production to which one can point as a milestone. This is so with The Tempest. There is not, I believe, a single production in the past generation that could be described as ‘revolutionary’; and yet our sense of the play in performance has changed greatly. Hence I want to offer not a collective review of the major productions of 1988, but some reflections on the play’s essences as they now appear on stage. They appear above all in the casting and playing of the three main parts, and the relationships within this triangle.
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Notes
Constance Benson, Mainly Players: Bensonian Memories (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), p. 179.
Constance Benson, Mainly Players: Bensonian Memories (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), p. 179. F. R. Benson saw Caliban as the missing link, an interpretation stemming from Daniel Wilson’s Caliban: The Missing Link (Toronto, 1873). There is a useful treatment of the Darwinian Caliban in Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘“Something rich and strange:” Caliban’s Theatrical Metamorphoses,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 390–405.
Constance Benson, Mainly Players: Bensonian Memories (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), p. 179. F. R. Benson saw Caliban as the missing link, an interpretation stemming from Daniel Wilson’s Caliban: The Missing Link (Toronto, 1873). There is a useful treatment of the Darwinian Caliban in Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘“Something rich and strange:” Caliban’s Theatrical Metamorphoses,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 390–405.
Milton Shulman, Standard, 14 September 1983.
Jonathan Miller openly read The Tempest in terms of Prospero and Caliban (second edition, New York: Praeger, 1964).
Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare: Interviews with Contemporary Directors (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), pp. 33–35.
See also Patrick Marnham’s obituary of Mannoni in The Independent (2 August 1989).
David Suchet, ‘Caliban,’ in Players of Shakespeare, ed. J. P. Brockbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 167–79.
A photograph is reproduced in Stephen Orgel’s edition of The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 82.
Braham Murray’s production of The Tempest at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, strikes me as an accurate barometric reading of the contemporary Caliban. ‘… there is an engaging performance as Caliban from Dan Hildebrand. With his rags, Rasta-style locks and gaudy tattoos, he might be a cross between some alienated North London squatter and the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz. It is possible to see both why Caliban looks for a leader when planning violence, and why Prospero keeps him chained. There is something both feeble and feral about his hooliganism.’ Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 15 September 1990.
It is reproduced in Rachel Kempson [Lady Redgrave], Life Among the Redgraves (New York: Dutton, 1988). See also the photograph of Elsa Lanchester as Ariel to Charles Laughton’s Prospero at the Old Vic, 1934. The Tempest, ed. Orgel, p. 78.
Irving Wardle, The Times, 21 May 1988.
Peter Hall’s Diaries, ed. John Goodwin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), p. 12.
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© 1993 Ralph Berry
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Berry, R. (1993). Within the Bermuda Triangle: Reflections on Recent Tempests. In: Shakespeare in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22871-3_11
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