Peter Viney's Blog

The Tempest
By William Shakespeare

Royal Shakespeare Company
Stratford-Upon-Avon

Thursday 2nd March 2023, 19.15

Directed by Elizabeth Freestone
Set Design – Tom Piper
Costume – Tom Piper & Natasha Ward

CAST

Alex Kingston -Prospero
Heledd Gwynn – Ariel
Jessica Rhodes – Miranda
Tommy Sim’aan – Caliban
Simon Startin – Stephano
Cath Whitfield- Trinculo
Jamie Ballard – Antonio
Joseph Payne- Ferdinand
Ishia Bennison – Gonzalo
Natalie Campbell- Iris as Rain
Tina Chiang- Master spirit
Grace Cookey-Gam – Sebastian
Peter de Jersey- Alonso
Liz Jadav – Jono, as Sky
Jonny Khan- Francisco
Natalie Kimmerling- Mariner / Spirit
David Lee Jones – Adrian
David Osmond – Mariner / Spirit
Rodrigo Oenalosa Pita – Boatswain / Spirit
Imogen Slaughter – Ceres, as Earth

Prospero as female. Should it be Prospera, then? The casting of females in male leading roles is justifiable here, especially as it’s played as ‘female.’ A protective parent with a young daughter works perfectly well either way. To me the female Hamlets are vanity projects by the actors.

In The Tempest a female lead should seem reasonable for me. The first time I saw it was an-all girls production at the Convent of The Holy Cross school, because girls we knew were in it. That Prospero had a long white false beard. We watched under the baleful eye of nuns. Gender switch works if the new role is played as female, rather a woman dressed up as a man. That’s what they did with Sebastian at the RSC back in 2012, and it worked.

This passes the RSC’s 50% gender equal target, with eleven out of twenty women. I’ve said it too often, but while I agree that 50% women in plays is a target, it should be ‘over the whole season’ not in each and every play, and also that the RSC and The Globe are the least suitable companies on Earth to institute it, because Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were never written that way. Fine for The National, Almeida, Chichester, Royal Court, where they can choose the plays to fit, but increasingly the blind pursuit of 50/50 casting in Shakespeare can and does distort the plays. During the rest of the season, there will be a female Brutus and a female Shylock, is that too much? In three plays, yes, it’s too much. Does it work here, that’s the question?

The setting is a future world suffering from a climate emergency. The poster (which is excellent) suggests it’s virtually Waterworld. The set was constructed out of used bits from the storerooms … that smacks a little of The Globe Ensemble’s awful “dressing up box, choose your own costumes” but it is not that haphazard and they have a fair stock of distressed sets. This looks like a ruined theatre with proscenium arch. While the programme boasts the green credentials of re-using stuff, it’s still very elaborate with levels going back, drawbridges, ladders, hoists, a large framed mirrored surface descending for just a couple of minutes, and an incredibly gratuitous use of mist from a rain machine in the last two minutes.

The programme is an issue, not for the first time at the RSC recently. We have long articles on climate change, which might explain the shipwreck (Hey! No! It’s a magic tempest) but it has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play and absolutely nothing to do with the production, unless we accept a one line note in the synopsis.

We had had to cancel our earlier booking due to illness. The RSC were incredibly helpful in re-booking us, as was our hotel. So here we are two weeks later, and near the end of the run. We had had a lovely meal with great friendly service in the RSC Rooftop Restaurant before. Our mood was good, we had read those four star reviews. There were lots of 6th formers in the audience, usually a voluble and receptive audience.

They started with the shipwreck, with as most often, actors standing weaving about. My first thought was I’ve seen this a dozen times, what with Shakespeare being so fond of shipwreck starts, but I’ve seen it done better. It wasn’t the choreography so much as unconvincing individual weaving about.

Then I thought the way they broke up the long Prospero to Miranda explanation of the backstory was very good, as it’s so often a five minute monologue, and here it never appeared to be. Alex Kingston did that well. A great improvement. Promising. I’m sitting up in happy anticipation.

Then it went rapidly downhill.

So what happened? It was our third RSC Tempest in ten years, and the weakest. Somehow, it refused to gel. You can always feel audience buzz, and there wasn’t any, though it got decent applause at the end, but no standing ovation, and the applause was very good, but was less than ecstatic.

Take Stephano and Trinculo, the comics. I’ve never seen their scenes with Caliban fall so flat before. They were working their socks off, loads of business, but nary a titter, let alone a laugh. They also didn’t do any of the cruder physical jokes about Caliban and Trinculo being hidden under the blanket, which may have been in deference to the large number of school kids we saw going in for the earlier matinee.  Ot just Bowdlerism.

Has it drifted since those four star reviews a month ago? Nearly everyone was playing too large. I hate singling out actors, but Peter de Jersey as Alonso was over-acting so much that even actor managers like Henry Irving or Laurence Olivier would have suggested turning the performance down a notch or three. He was the most OTT performance I’ve seen in years,  though marks for sheer (over) dramatic effort.

Even Jamie Ballard, an actor so good that we’ve gone to plays just to see him, was flailing his arms wildly and gesturing as Antonio and shouting at full volume. Throughout, over-acting was an issue, so maybe that lack of buzz I mentioned was driving them all to try harder and harder. Bigger and bigger. Louder and louder.

Prospero’s big late speech was drawn out, over paused, over delivered, over-egged. She just wasn’t up to Jonathan Slinger or Simon Russell-Beale and not at all because of her gender. She was however, as so often, a tad old (sixty) for a forty-five year old (Miranda is fifteen, Prospero has known her for a third of of his/her life, so is forty-five). But then nearly every Prospero is much too old for the role as written. I suspect the magic power to command the seas makes directors see Prospero as Poseidon. Hence the long white beards.

Normally, I’ll criticize everything except the actors. Not today. I didn’t like most of the performances. Women in the roles worked badly for both Gonzalo and Sebastian, yet I have seen female Sebastians before, and they worked very well. Gender was not the issue. Direction was. Prospero gets insufficient magic. The role requires more magic staffs and sudden lightning, though there was one good bit where Prospero makes Ferdinand writhe by the power of her staff.

Caliban was poorly conceived. Tommy Simm’aan was fine in acting and delivery, though insufficiently simian. Caliban is enslaved, his mother is a witch of Algiers, so he is ethnically different, he’s distorted, ugly, a slavering would-be rapist. A normal handsome looking chap in a string vest and cloth knee pads doesn’t do the job. Past productions have brought out the early colonialism and enslavement themes in the play, which is much nearer the mark than climate change. Dare I say that works far better if you cast a BAME actor as Caliban? Taliban as Caliban? That would be way too non-PC. Also the RSC strictures from 2022 on only disabled actors playing disabled roles mean he can’t be hunchbacked, limping or ugly. Apparently he can’t slobber and fiddle with himself while looking at a terrified Miranda, who being empowered, can’t even look frightened of the man who’s tried to rape her. Plus he has been enslaved, his island robbed from him by the arriving Prospero. That doesn’t come to the forefront at all.  It was a moment when I thought, ‘Have they understood the play at all?’

Miranda and Ferdinand had the virtue of truly looking very young. That fits. In fact Miranda in the background during the scene with Ferdinand and Prospero in conversation drew more genuine laughs than any of the clown scenes. I much admired her one handed suspended hold.

Ariel had the songs and she was good. The hoist and air dancing as she ascended was a good touch, but spoiled by the amount of time it took to rig her arm with the wires. If you use wires, you have a back clamp and get the wire on virtually surreptitiously. It’s why they always look better coming down than going up.

On the music, they were fine in the instrumental pieces, though it was misguided to have them playing over the early Prospero lines. But having such a good band, why were songs unaccompanied?

Even the two seamen at the end, casts the small Asian woman as the ship’s master and the tall man as the sailor. Then another thought comes. The ship is restored at the end. It was never a real tempest at all but Prospero’s  magic. So why all the climate change and tempest links that are trumpeted? 

I thought the first part of 85 minutes was poor, one of the weakest things I’ve seen at Stratford in a decade. 

The second part was better because of the spirits, and dancing, often cut. They were a really major lift to the play, all of them, as were their costumes, and no, that major five person feathered bird with Ariel as the head was not found lying in the props box.  Maybe the movement of the various incarnations of spirits contributed to the good reviews. Interestingly even the positive reviews found it ‘long.’ Actually, 2 hours 25 minutes is merely average / expected for Shakespeare, short even. The fact that reviewers thought it long is a major negative. It wasn’t. I never found it long myself, just utterly disjointed.

I love seeing the 6th form at Stratford, and then trooping back to their buses. The first Stratford Shakespeare is magical, and if you were seeing it for the first time after lesser productions, the colour, the noise, the activity, the efforts at comedy would look great. I so hope they were thrilled.

I am totally perplexed by the four star reviews from reviewers I respect. 

The programme is really poor. If I want to know about threatened island communities, I will find it for myself. Prospero’s Island is not a threatened island community. It has a human population of just three. The ruined theatre might suggest the aftermath of a disaster, but there’s nothing to follow that up. The detritus of plastic bottles and cans surrounding the stage is a strong pointer to polluted seas, and I thought the famed plastic duck a nice though very brief and unmarked  touch- they spread worldwide from a container which fell off a ship. They didn’t do polluted seas. They did climate change. But in the end the programme note is someone’s personal issue, and however much they try to hammer it home, is not echoed in the play. I want the director’s vision in the programme instead, or how Alex Kingston felt about playing it. The worthy essay about moving towards a green theatre of recycled bits was relevant to the set, but if so they re-purposed so much that the overall saving to the planet wouldn’t add up to a flatulent bovine. I thought it pious and inaccurate. RSC programmes were always a bench mark. No longer. They have declined into sub-themes.

The RSC sorely needs its imminent new directors, and there was none of this drum beating on gender or ecology or disability at Chichester when the incoming Daniel Evans was there, though I’d bet he easily used 50% women actors over the season and had a broad ethnic casting. They just didn’t make a fuss about it. It is really time for a radical change. I’m not saying cut the agendas, just stop shouting relentlessly about them.

**

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

It wasn’t universal acclaim. Susannah Clapp made similar points in The Observer, including the need for a new leadership team. Fiona Mountford in the i found it lethargic.

4 star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian ****

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****

Patrick Marmion, The Daily Mail ****
“A show that makes familiar text sing anew, and proves what wonders the RSC can perform when they match their loftily woke political agenda with serious artistic ambition.“

James Garrington, Reviews Hub, ****

3 star

Susannah Clapp, The Observer, ***
Dominic Maxwell, The Times ***
Michael Davies, What’s On Stage ***

2 Star

Fiona Mountford, The i, **

I agree.

OTHER PRODUCTIONS ON THIS BLOG:

THE TEMPEST:

• The Tempest RSC 2012
• The Tempest, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
• The Tempest, RSC 2016 (Simon Russell-Beale)
• The Tempest, Bath Ustinov 2022

ELIZABETH FREESTONE
Henry V, Bath Ustinov Studio, 2018

JAMIE BALLARD
Measure for Measure, RSC 2012 (Angelo)
The Merchant of Venice, The RSC, 2015 (Antonio)
King John, Rose, Kingston (King John)
Macbeth, Trafalgar Studios, 2013 (MacDuff)
The White Devil, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2017 (Bracciano)

HELEDD GWYNN
Henry V, Bath Ustinov Studio, 2018

JESSICA RHODES
Doubt- A Parable, Chichester 2022