The Tempest by William Shakespeare

in the English-speaking world. Born in 1925, he first directed at Stratford in 1947. His work has been influenced by a range of approaches from Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theater” to Indian and African notions of storytelling;
The Empty Space
, his book of 1968, remains the best introduction to his art. Following his groundbreaking 1970 “white box and circus skills”
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
at Stratford, he moved to Paris and founded his International Centre for Theatre Research. He continued to produce innovative work at his intimate Bouffes du Nord Theatre well into his eighties. He has directed
The Tempest
no fewer than four times: in 1957, with John Gielgud as Prospero, again in 1963 and 1968, then in 1990 with his company of international actors at the Bouffes. In this interview, he speaks mostly about the last of these productions.
    Sam Mendes was born in 1965 and began directing classic drama both for the RSC and on the West End stage soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was artistic director of the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London. His first movie,
American Beauty
(1999), won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. His 1993 RSC production of
The Tempest
, which he talks about here, featured Alec McCowen as Prospero and Simon Russell Beale as Ariel.
    Rupert Goold was born in 1977. He studied at Cambridge and was an assistant director at the Donmar under Mendes. After undertaking a range of experimental work, he directed two highly acclaimed Shakespearean productions with the veteran stage and television actor Patrick Stewart:
The Tempest
of 2006, which he talks about here, part of the RSC’s year-long Complete Works Festival, and an intimate
Macbeth
in 2007 at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, with a transfer to London’s West End.
    The storm offers a spectacular opening to the play. How did you approach it from a design point of view?
    Brook: The first scene of
The Tempest
needs to be a beginning, leading one into the story. If it becomes a show in itself, the play cannot survive. Once, I staged it experimentally around a swinging plank, covered with bricks, with a model galleon in the middle. The actors stood behind and played the text—for once every word was heard! Then Prospero took a brick and smashed the ship. At once, Miranda cried out her protest and the story began. Then, when we did the play at the Bouffes, Ariel carried the model boat on his head, rocking a long tube full of pebbles to evoke the sound of waves as it was rocked and the actors held sticks to suggest the movements of the sea. This led straight into the scene between Prospero and Miranda—and the audience wanted to know more.
    Mendes: The way I approached the storm was tied into my whole approach to the play. I would say that my production explored the play along lines that, crudely put, see Prospero as a director and his subjects as actors, and the journey of the play as an enactment created by Prospero in an empty space in order to lead to what he hopeswill be ultimate resolution. My sense of the production now is that it was what I would call a young man’s vision of the play. It was full of ideas and probably quite imaginative but not entirely rigorous in its thought process! It’s a play that I’d love to do again and would now do quite differently.
    The storm came out of the central conceit of the production, which is that Prospero had been washed up on the island with certain objects and they resided on his makeshift, driftwood desk throughout the production. There was a book that opened up into a Pollock’s toy theater, there was a vase of flowers, there was a small skip with his clothes, and out of those simple objects emerged all the magic and the poetry of the play. When the Lords, Gonzalo, Antonio, etc. arrived on the island for the first time they were surrounded by the flowers; to create the masque Ariel (played by Simon