and so on. It would have made a big impact. But the cinema does such things better.” 29 The director of this production, Clifford Williams, also stated: “The play is termed a romance, but you can’t present a romance in romantic terms—the baroque, the rococo; we don’t respond to them any more.” 30
Although this 1963 production was referred to as gimmicky and failed to impress an unprepared theatrical world, it marked a sea change in the way directors thought about the play and how the RSC designed its productions. The company’s next three productions also worked with pared-down abstract sets, and it was not until 1982, almost twenty years later, that a more elaborate design returned to the main stage at Stratford-upon-Avon. Abstract settings encouraged a more cerebral reading of the play, prompting us to think of the play’s characters as being metaphorical, aspects of Prospero’s mind, whereas designs that created a more formulated environment often threw the focus of the play on more external issues such as kingship, inheritance, revenge, treachery, and colonialism.
The stage design alone can often indicate what type of interpretation we are about to experience. Directors today have the visual freedom of expression to conduct an examination of many of the things that the play makes us ponder: the corrupting influence of power and revenge, the complexity of Prospero’s mind, or the use of the play as ameans of looking at the very nature of theater itself. The following three RSC productions (1982, 1988 and 1993) took on these different challenges in imaginative ways. The skeletal shape of the wreck of Prospero’s ship dominated the set for the 1982 Ron Daniels production:
In the opening storm scene, a boat’s prow pushes out toward the audience while the beleaguered crew do valiant battle with the sound effects. A large black sail billows in the wind. Prospero’s island is then revealed as a broken ship of state, with a severely crushed foredeck, leaning mast with crow’s nest, and tattered sails.… This is a strong visual conception that underlines the political upheavals back home in Milan and establishes Prospero as an exiled magician rather than an eccentric conjurer. The masques and apparitions are produced from behind the ship’s defunct main sail: Caliban enters from below deck through a trapdoor, and Ariel and his fellow sprites nip speedily about the boat like willing versatile cabin boys. 31
Ned Chaillet of
The Times
described it as a production of:
All glitter and light, all colour and hooped skirts with collars of shining wire and air. The beastly terrors invoked and unleashed on the conspiracy of fools led by Caliban are misshapen demons with glowing eyes, preceded by the baying skeletons of dogs. 32
The “hyper realistic wreck” 33 of the ship housed the characters and confined the action of the play within its limits. This was Prospero’s ship and his magic emanated from the core of a corrupted vessel. The nature of his magic was morally ambiguous, and the set indicated a corruption in both the man and the state of Milan, which he once represented. As Michael Billington said in his review, this production never let the spectator forget that “this is a play about power” and about the “internal struggle between Prospero’s own omnipotence and humanity.” 34
In order to emphasize a more cerebral reading of the play, the 1988 RSC production, directed by Nicholas Hytner, returned to the use of apared-down set. A white, shaped disc on which the action took place successfully symbolized the magic island and Prospero’s mind:
On a disc of sun-whitened boards, framed by billows of shifting cloudscape, Nicholas Hytner’s dream-Tempest unfolds. This circle, it seems, is Prospero’s mind’s eye … the characters are the stuff of his dream, to be disposed of as he wishes. 35
The disc of an island (designed by David Fielding) is decorated with a single rock which looks
Although this 1963 production was referred to as gimmicky and failed to impress an unprepared theatrical world, it marked a sea change in the way directors thought about the play and how the RSC designed its productions. The company’s next three productions also worked with pared-down abstract sets, and it was not until 1982, almost twenty years later, that a more elaborate design returned to the main stage at Stratford-upon-Avon. Abstract settings encouraged a more cerebral reading of the play, prompting us to think of the play’s characters as being metaphorical, aspects of Prospero’s mind, whereas designs that created a more formulated environment often threw the focus of the play on more external issues such as kingship, inheritance, revenge, treachery, and colonialism.
The stage design alone can often indicate what type of interpretation we are about to experience. Directors today have the visual freedom of expression to conduct an examination of many of the things that the play makes us ponder: the corrupting influence of power and revenge, the complexity of Prospero’s mind, or the use of the play as ameans of looking at the very nature of theater itself. The following three RSC productions (1982, 1988 and 1993) took on these different challenges in imaginative ways. The skeletal shape of the wreck of Prospero’s ship dominated the set for the 1982 Ron Daniels production:
In the opening storm scene, a boat’s prow pushes out toward the audience while the beleaguered crew do valiant battle with the sound effects. A large black sail billows in the wind. Prospero’s island is then revealed as a broken ship of state, with a severely crushed foredeck, leaning mast with crow’s nest, and tattered sails.… This is a strong visual conception that underlines the political upheavals back home in Milan and establishes Prospero as an exiled magician rather than an eccentric conjurer. The masques and apparitions are produced from behind the ship’s defunct main sail: Caliban enters from below deck through a trapdoor, and Ariel and his fellow sprites nip speedily about the boat like willing versatile cabin boys. 31
Ned Chaillet of
The Times
described it as a production of:
All glitter and light, all colour and hooped skirts with collars of shining wire and air. The beastly terrors invoked and unleashed on the conspiracy of fools led by Caliban are misshapen demons with glowing eyes, preceded by the baying skeletons of dogs. 32
The “hyper realistic wreck” 33 of the ship housed the characters and confined the action of the play within its limits. This was Prospero’s ship and his magic emanated from the core of a corrupted vessel. The nature of his magic was morally ambiguous, and the set indicated a corruption in both the man and the state of Milan, which he once represented. As Michael Billington said in his review, this production never let the spectator forget that “this is a play about power” and about the “internal struggle between Prospero’s own omnipotence and humanity.” 34
In order to emphasize a more cerebral reading of the play, the 1988 RSC production, directed by Nicholas Hytner, returned to the use of apared-down set. A white, shaped disc on which the action took place successfully symbolized the magic island and Prospero’s mind:
On a disc of sun-whitened boards, framed by billows of shifting cloudscape, Nicholas Hytner’s dream-Tempest unfolds. This circle, it seems, is Prospero’s mind’s eye … the characters are the stuff of his dream, to be disposed of as he wishes. 35
The disc of an island (designed by David Fielding) is decorated with a single rock which looks
Similar Books
