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Performance Review: The Tempest

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.1996.0015

1086-332X

Stephen Orgel,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Reviewed by: The Tempest Stephen Orgel The Tempest. By William Shakespeare. Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California. 19 July 1995. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s production of The Tempest, directed by Danny Scheie. Photo: Ann Parker. Danny Scheie made his debut as a professional director with an audacious and hilarious Comedy of Errors for Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 1988. As Artistic Director of the company since 1992, he has been responsible for a remarkable series of innovative Shakespeare productions, for the most part performed outdoors in a redwood grove on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. His work, even at its most deliberately outrageous (at Theatre Rhinoceros, for example, an all-male, frankly homoerotic Twelfth Night with Malvolio omitted), has been consistently interesting and genuinely enlightening about elements of the Shakespeare text that tend to be ignored or even suppressed by the editorial and critical tradition. The indignation his productions often evoke is a measure of how genuinely unsettling his readings tend to be for people devoted to settled notions of Shakespeare. Scheie’s tenure as Artistic Director ends this season. For his final play he appropriately chose The Tempest. It is a brilliantly irreverent production, endlessly inventive, wildly funny, and even, on occasion, passionate and moving. Scheie’s Tempest is undeniably not serious about any of the things the play is supposed to be serious about: magic, science, nature, art, grace. Scheie also ignores the recent critical history of the play; this Tempest has as much to do with colonialism as does Gilligan’s Island—to which, indeed, in one of many sight-gags, it alludes. The production is certainly a send-up, though its target is less the play than traditional pieties about the play: the spirit of Charles Ludlam is very much in evidence. Some of the play’s richness gets lost in the excitement, but the excitement is real, and rare. Every production is a selective version of the text, and Scheie’s Tempest remains deeply in touch with a dimension that most directors ignore or understate: its essential character as both spectacular theatre and comedy. This is the drama in which Shakespeare makes the fullest use of the mechanical, visual, and auditory resources of his stage, employing flying machines, ascents and descents, appearing and disappearing properties, storm effects, and more music than any other of his dramas. Scheie’s Tempest is very much about the possibilities of comic theatre. And the play is unabashedly a comedy here, not a “romance.” The single set is an absurdly steeply raked stage with three cloud curtains at the rear, liberally accommodated with trapdoors. The decor, insofar as there is a consistent one, suggests the 1950s: Miranda listens to the offstage shipwreck victims on a short wave radio; the storm consists of lawn sprinklers in the redwood grove, populated for the moment by Prospero’s spirits—a group of screaming pre-adolescent girls in swimsuits; Prospero controls Caliban with electrodes covering his head and body; the nymphs wear outfits that recall Forbidden Planet; Miranda views her past through a plastic stereopticon; Prospero’s magic book is Popular Science. But the production is contemporary enough when it wants to be: Miranda is a Calvin Klein nymphet in cutoff jeans; Prospero reveals his intentions on a large color monitor; and the storm is played out to the musical theme from The Poseidon Adventure. The play is full of sight and sound gags: Ariel is summoned and directed with—what else?—a television aerial; Alonso’s banquet is a gigantic tv dinner with Ariel as the meat; the villains appear on the television screen as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz; the action is intermittently punctuated with the Blondie song The Tide Is High; bits of Bach cantatas abound—with “Flout ‘em and scout ‘em” sung to the music of Eröffne den feurigen Abgrund, o Hölle from the Saint Matthew Passion, which fits it astonishingly well. Irwin Appel’s Prospero is radically unorthodox, with no trace of either Gielgud’s benign magician or Michael Hordern’s disaffected intellectual. A mad scientist in a...