Peter Viney's Blog

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Deborah Warner
Designed by Christof Hetzer
Lighting design Jean Kalman
Sound design and composer Mel Mercier
Video designer Torge Møller

Bath Ustinov Studio
Tuesday 26th July 2022, evening

CAST

(Presented in the traditional ‘rank of character and (mainly) male before female,’ rather than alphabetical, or order of appearance or my favoured size of role.)

Derek Hutchinson – Alfonso, King of Naples
Luke Mullins – Sebastian, his brother
Nicholas Woodeson – Prospero, the right Duke of Milan
Finbar Lynch- Antonio, his brother, the usurping Duke of Milan
Piero Niel-Mee – Ferdinand, son to the King of Naples
William Chubb – Gonzalo, an honest old counsellor
Ben Jones – Adrian, a courtier
Natalie Winsor- Francesca, a courtier
Edward Hogg – Calban, a native of the island
Stephen Kennedy- Trinculo, an entertainer
Gary Sefton – Stephano, a cook
Tanvi Virmani – Miranda, daughter to Prospero
Dickie Beau- Ariel, an airy spirit
Andrew Speed – boatswain

It’s Deborah Warner’s debut as artistic director of the Ustinov Studio.

I thought Michael Billington had retired as our premier (and greatest) theatre critic, but the posters have an over-sticker from a Country Life review. We couldn’t find the review in the July or August issues (both were in W.H. Smith). But then I couldn’t find the Daily Mail review also stuck on the poster boards outside.

It has a cast of fourteen in a studio theatre that some sources say has 126 seats, others 140 seats. One review asked why they didn’t move it next door to the Theatre Royal. It’s running for a month. Without disparaging the Bath audience, the Theatre Royal was only half-full for August Wilson the next day. It fills for Ayckbourn, Rattigan and Coward. A visually elaborate Tempest with a couple of stars might work in the large theatre – Peter Hall did a Shakespeare in most of his seasons there – but this one wouldn’t fill it. It’s definitely a different, studio style version rather than a popular version. However, the result is a crowded stage when (e.g.) the shipwrecked seven are on together, let alone at the end.

While it uses projection a great deal, including a shimmer over Ariel and spilling onto everything and everyone near the beginning, and the twin TV screens, there was something that seemed 60s or 70s about the minimal set with sheets of unpainted fibre board. Maybe it was that the acting style was more mannered and highly theatrical than usual in the 21st century. Freezes, slow motion, stately walks from Aerial. It was unusual in style, that’s for sure. At first I found it pretentious, it even reminded me of Principal Edward’s Magic Theatre in 1970 with its tragic clowns and mimes, but I warmed to it. It was unlike any version I’ve seen before. Karen said it was like Samuel Beckett does Shakespeare, which works for me at pinning the oddness.

The set has panels of wood, some shiny, some plain fibreboard, propped around the sides. Some are propped over entrances and are flung down on specific entrances. There’s a top window like a balcony, and two large TV screens which have videos sometimes. There’s a pit of large pebbles for the barefoot cast to walk over, and a dirt pit. My heart usually sinks at dirt pits, ever since Calixto Bieto’s Forests at the Barbican, probably the worst play I have ever seen. They’re like overhead showers on stage, extremely uncomfortable for actors. In this Trinculo falls and wallows giving him dark brown underpants at the back for the rest of the play.

It’s modern dress. Nicholas Woodeson’s Prospero reminded me of seeing Paul Simon on stage, the shortest person there but strangely exuding that he’s powerful, which suits Prospero. However, I thought that long initial Prospero / Miranda scene tedious and off-putting, but I tend to think of that as built in to the play

Miranda moves in a cat-like feral way, after all she has not seen another normal human since she was three, apart from her father. She also holds her mouth in a ‘savage’ way as if never trained to smile or interact.

While Prosperous and Miranda are scruffy, they don’t allow for having had the same clothes for twelve years. His magic cape is a few feet of discarded polythene wrap. Incidentally, adding up lines in the text makes it clear that Prospero is not much more than forty, which has only happened in my presence with the RSC production with Jonathan Slinger.

Some reviewers found Prospero more difficult to hear than the rest of the cast, and Karen found that too. She could hear everyone else loud and clear, but not him. I was fine with hearing him.

Broadway World‘s review by Cheryl Markovsky makes some good points on sound:

An android-like Ariel (played gymnastically by a very focused and startle-eyed Dickie Beau) is amplified through a distorted microphone to lend him chilling qualities as Prospero’s entrapped sprite, but it’s difficult to cut through the warped amplification and atonal soundscape to make out his lines.

With the actors by and large ignoring the audience and playing side-to-side to the wings, it’s not only tricky to capture much of Shakespeare’s brilliant and evocative language, but also nigh on impossible to feel much emotion in this show. I was longing for Prospero to come downstage more and engage with the audience.

Cheryl Markovsky, Broadway World

The unquestioned star is Dicky Bow Dickie Beau as Ariel. Ariel has a T-shirt with INVISIBLE on it, and Prospero never looks directly at him. We saw it well into the run. Some reviews praise his known ability to lip-synch and say he’s lip synching to an echoey recording of his voice. He’s the only one on stage with a head microphone taped on the back of his head, and so I thought he was speaking live with an echo delay added to make it other worldly. Another review thought it a mixture, and with the singing as well, that’s probably right. His yoga ability to stand without using his arms was notable, then in the last several (many) minutes of the play he sits absolutely motionless in a lotus position, and his eyes do not blink. How do you do that? Though a few minutes earlier his eyes looked weird and I wondered if he’s added contact lenses (or was it unsurpassable eye acting?)

As an aside here, when my granddaughter was 18 months, she found a ladybird. We got a book with a picture, and she pointed atthe picture and said ‘toy’ then at the living ladybird and said, ‘real.’ Then she was obsessed with the distinction. Ariel is a spirit so without gender, though I’d cast a female. I’d do that because so late in his life, Shakespeare must have been thinking of his own “real” daughters and perhaps contrasting the “real” earthly Miranda with the imaginary “toy” airy spirit.

The shipwrecked courtly Milanese and Neapolitans are in evening dress, dinner jackets and life jackets with dripping wet faces, perhaps having swum in from a luxury yacht. Nicholas Chubb was Gonzalo, the one who loaded the exiled Prospero’s boat with supplies twelve years earlier. I think they lost some lines about that which undermines the role. He was last seen by us in Chichester just a few months ago in The Taxidermist’s Daughter and has an air of authority in every role.

The shipwrecked and lonely Ferdinand is Miranda’s love interest, and when captured by Prospero has to do the log collecting scene with his legs tied together, hopping.

Caliban is in filthy Y-fronts and vest, and is not physically distorted – are they following the RSC in avoiding prosthetic deformities? He is twitchy and gross, throwing excrement from the back of his filthy Y-fronts at Prospero. The black beard briefly made me confuse Caliban and Taliban (there’s an idea).

Trinculo and Stefano have physically demanding parts in a trio with Caliban, who has to lick their feet, legs, shoes, lap from a bowl, share a drinking tube, get liquid spat over him. They also have to strip down to underpants. To us, the production was overbalanced in favour of the comic trio, with as much grossness as possible. Stefano first appears looking round a flat, while obviously peeing behind it. The position of Caliban and Trinculo under the tarpaulin is head to tail, with appropriate reactions. They were an extreme version, and very funny, but it somehow stole the centre of the play.

The oddity that I always notice is Prospero talking of Caliban:

His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs

I always think, So, You’re Miranda’s father and you’re a wizard. What’s the problem?

Karen noted that Francesco had become Francesca, and she had few lines, but had to provide pillows, and put Alfonso’s shirt back on for him which was gender stereotyping.

The theatre is an intimate space and steeply raked so superb eye lines. In row D we really we were face on and up close. It’s also uncomfortable seating for longer plays at my height, because there is no foot room under the row in front and a shared bench seat for two. However, it’s high praise that I did not suffer from the usual twitching I feel there, which means I was completely absorbed.

The lighting and sound were a tour de force throughout, incredible work, combined with projection much of the time, even when merely a shimmer as on Prospero here. Though we had waves, spirits, characters on the TV screens in profile walking on the beach.

MILLUN

The affectation of pronouncing ‘Milan’ as ‘Millun’ in The Tempest grates on me, and it’s not the first time. Ben Crystal’s Pronouncing Guides for Shakespeare insist it’s Millun, and he has researched extensively, is the Globe pronunciation advisor, and has done ‘original pronunciation’ productions. What’s the point of that, apart from academic interest? Why? How can anyone be certain? Does anyone care? Maybe some Elizabethan or Jacobean writer rhymed Milan and villain, but if so, why wasn’t it ‘villain’ that was pronounced like Milan? Vill-an rather than Vill-uhn. Unless you’re doing an authentic practices version, it is a really silly affectation to my ear. So much else (and so many words and gender of characters) have changed. Then I had a neighbour who went to Palma, Madge-Orca every year, but I never regarded him as a pronunciation model.

PROGRAMME

The essay on The Tempest says ’Shakespeare’s lover, Harry Southampton,’ not ’alleged’ or ’possible’ but hard fact. It’s not hard fact but an assumption. Plus why ’Harry’? I know he was an earl, but that’s how we describe him, Henry Wriothesley, The 3^rd Earl of Southampton. ‘Harry’ is too matey. The 2016 play, Dedication: Shakespeare and Southampton, by Nick Dear presented three different versions of the potential relationship between writer and patron. It’s ambiguous not a ‘fact.’

OVERALL

Four stars seems the consensus, but the three star reviews (and the un-star rated reviews) make similar points about the focus on the comedy trio, as well as a losing the Prospero / Miranda centre somewhat, and lack of clarity on Prospero.

It unfashionably swerved away from the colonisation / slavery theme around Caliban, which tends to be played up elsewhere … casting a white Caliban changes that. Prospero is a hard taskmaster with Aerial, physically grabbing him, though he never looks at him. When finally released, Ariel dies. That was powerful. I veer from three to four.

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4 star

David Jays, The Guardian ****
Clive Davis The Times ****
Susannah Clapp, The Observer ****
Kris Hallett, What’s On Stage, ****
Rosemary Waugh, The Stage ****
Graham Wyle, Stage Talk ****

three star

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ***
Mark Kidel, The Arts Desk ***

OTHER VERSIONS OF THE TEMPEST ON THIS SITE:

• The Tempest RSC 2012 (Jonathan Slinger)
• The Tempest, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
• The Tempest, RSC 2016 (Simon Russell-Beale)
• The Tempest RSC 2023 (Alex Kingston)

LINKS ON THIS SITE

WILLIAM CHUBB (Gonzalo)
The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Chichester April 2022
Racing Demon, Bath 2017
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic, 2017 (Polonius)
Richard II, Globe 2015 (Duke of York)
Othello – NT 2013
Othello – Shakespeare’s Globe 2018

STEPHEN KENNEDY
King John, The Rose, Kingston 2016

FINBARR LYNCH
Richard III, Almeida 2016

LUKE MULLINS
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Old Vic, 2017 (Hamlet)

EDWARD HOGG
Romeo & Juliet, Globe 2017 (Romeo)