The Tempest by William Shakespeare Page A

Russell Beale), opened the small Pollock’s toy theater book and a fully grown Pollock’s toy theater emerged out of the ground. Caliban’s cave was Prospero’s skip, and so on. So everything had a root in Prospero’s belongings and the storm was no different.
    The storm was created out of a skip and a swinging lantern. We began on an empty stage and the first image that you saw was Ariel walking up onto stage and swinging the lantern, and the moment the lantern went into motion the sailors exploded out of the skip and the stage became the boat. It was a deliberately theatrical conceit and at no point, like the rest of the production, attempted to convey the sense that the island was real. The island was a state of mind, a space in which Prospero could conduct his human experiment, his fantasy of revenge. There were photos in the program of a variety of mad film directors, from Orson Welles to David Lean, who had tried to govern the natural world, to impose their will on it. That was our vision of Prospero.
    Goold: My starting point was in trying to convey the helpless fear one feels as a passenger when a storm hits—after all, most of the characters who speak in the scene are not mariners. Initially I intended to stage the scene on a plane during a crash as I expect most modern audiences will have more vivid and unsettling experiences of air travel than sea now. However, I worried that we would suffer incomparison to the TV series
Lost
(itself inspired by
The Tempest
) and so we stayed on a boat.
    As a child I remember being on cross-channel ferries and feeling very vulnerable and it struck me that the experience below deck is more frightening than above. Perhaps our collective fear of burial alive has been stoked by submarine films but certainly that seemed an unusual focus. So Giles Cadle (our designer) and I tried to create a very claustrophobic navigation cell below deck into which the lords and mariners would pitch and panic. The idea of that cell being set in a radio came from my interest in opening with the shipping forecast and a rather weak pun on the word Ariel!
    Perhaps what animated the sequence most in the end, though, were our queasy monumental projections of the pitching sea that accompanied the sequence.
    There is an unusually long exposition in Act 1 Scene 2, in which Prospero, as “schoolmaster,” narrates past events to Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban. On one occasion, Miranda appears to be falling asleep—how did you avoid the risk that some audience members might join her?
    Brook: It’s only if the storm is too spectacular that Prospero’s tale becomes a bore. Yet when Gielgud played it—or on another occasion I saw Paul Scofield in the same role—it couldn’t occur to anyone in the audience, nor even to the actors themselves, that this extraordinary narrative could be less than fascinating. But as Miranda has been brought up in an exotic dream, she has no living associations to connect to in this tale from another reality.
    Mendes: It’s called good acting! But I also gave Alec McCowen (who played Prospero) a little help: the people that he described walked on stage as he told his story. They emerged from behind a tiny screen, which was one of the other things that had been washed up on the island with him. It was used throughout the production to conjure up people center-stage. The actors didn’t make entrances and exits from the wings; they tended to emerge from behind objects—in this case, from behind the screen stepped all the people that Prospero was talking about, from Antonio to Gonzalo, so we animated his story a little.
    I think that Shakespeare begins the play with a very simple story quite deliberately. A good actor will make an audience feel like they’re sitting at his feet, very much like Miranda is, and will be as gripped by the story as she appears to be. Your reading of it is that she seems to be falling asleep. But I think Prospero is distracted—when he says “[Dost]