The Tempest by William Shakespeare Page B

thou hear,” I think he is so wrapped up in his memories that he gradually becomes less and less aware of her as an audience. I don’t think he’s scrutinizing her for responses all the time. I think that having not talked about it for twelve years, he reopens old wounds, and is now plunged right back into the events themselves. I think that’s the sort of thing that Shakespeare was after.
    Goold: I always wanted to not “stage” the scene around Prospero and Miranda as some productions do, because unless you focus on Prospero’s relationship to the story we never really get let in on him as a character. The idea we worked with was that although Prospero knew that the day of the play lay under “an auspicious star,” perhaps he didn’t know what was going to be auspicious about it. Patrick [Stewart, who played Prospero] liked the idea that Prospero had been standing on the cliffs and seen the Neapolitan boat and, in that moment, decided to raise the storm. So he began the scene in a state of great agitation and shock and this gave it a useful urgency. I also think there are a lot of laughs in the scene if played properly, both in the text—Miranda’s interjections mostly—but also in the relationship: the cranky old father/teacher and his trusting pupil. The laughs and the rage, from both characters, shape the scene and prevent one long serene narration.
    Neither Ariel nor Caliban is conventionally human: what particular challenges does the presence of such parts create for the director and the actor?
    Brook: In the Bouffes production, which was our most developed version after many years of trials and errors, I tried to avoid the clichés of a lighter-than-air dancer like Ariel. Instead we had an African actor, Bakary Sangaré, with the physique of a rugby player, but with such a lightness of spirit, wit, and fantasy that he suggested Arielness more than any illustration could do. It was the same principlethat had once led to acrobatics and dexterity for fairies in the
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
. With Caliban again we tried to avoid illustration—he was played by David Bennent, the same actor who had been the violent child in the film of Gunther Grass’
Tin Drum
. He suggested all the fury and rebellion of an adolescent in his relationship with the tyrannical adult who had power over him.
    Mendes: Fun challenges! That’s the joy of doing the play, how you render the other worlds that Prospero is attempting to control: the spiritual, the world of the air, and the earth. How do you render “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”? To me, that’s one of the chief interpretative decisions that you have to make. How do you treat those figures? Do you treat them, as Peter Brook did, as totally and unexpectedly opposite figures, or, as Jonathan Miller has done, as two versions of the same thing—in Jonathan’s case, enslaved natives. I felt like I had seen enough barnacled Rastafarian hunchbacked Calibans to last me a lifetime. I felt like the sense in which he is the beating heart of the play was diminished by making him merely a put-upon native. David Troughton and I wanted to keep him very, very simple, and all we ended up with was a single clawlike hand and a very pale, hairless body. In the end I felt he was absolutely wonderful in the part and incredibly touching.
    Simon Russell Beale’s performance was in a way the most remarkable. Again we started off with a series of theatrical conceits we were going to attempt and abandoned them one after the other as we progressed. I sometimes think that’s the true process of rehearsals—stripping away idea after idea, leaving one simple, beautiful one and that’s what happened here. He was going to have a doll face, he was going to have some strange wig, he was going to wear white gloves and slippers, and it ended up as simply him in a blue Chairman Mao suit. He was a remarkably cold and restrained Ariel. You sensed always that there was a vast world that