Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by William Shakespeare, directed by D. Jeremy Smith
Driftwood Theatre Company, Withrow Park, Toronto
touring Ontario (see July and August Listings for dates and venues)
July 12-August 17, 2014
Prospero: “The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance”
The Driftwood Theatre Company is celebrating its 20th season with a new production of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Director D. Jeremy Smith says of the company, “Our aesthetic is one of simple clarity: to tell the best stories and to tell them honestly”. That is exactly what he achieves in The Tempest, where passage after passage mumbled over even at Stratford leap out alive with meaning. Not all aspects of the current production work as well as they ought to, but it will provide a great first-time experience of the play and an enjoyable one even for those who know the play well.
The first of Smith’s innovations is to relocate the action in the pre-digital 20th-century. The shipwreck that opens Shakespeare’s play becomes a plane crash with much of the dialogue modified to suit. Unlike far too many Tempests, Smith’s does not allow the soundscape of the storm to become so loud that it drowns out the actors’ voices. How they react to the storm already provides a glimpse into their natures. In one of many imaginative strokes, the passengers of the doomed plane parachute from the plane by throwing miniature versions of themselves into the audience.
The explanation for causing the wreck that Prospero (Richard Alan Campbell) gives to his daughter Miranda (Miriam Fernandes) is one of the clearest I have ever heard. Smith helps make the Prospero’s complex backstory relevant to the coming action by spotlighting each of the characters Prospero mentions as he tells his tale. Thus we associate the face with the characters’ past deeds and can more easily understand how they motivate the characters in the present.
Later in the play, Antonio’s explanation to Sebastian why they should murder the sleeping Alonso, King of Naples, is often spoken with so little care that the relations among the three are unclear. Here, however, Christopher Darroch finally makes sense of Antonio’s speeches and in so doing highlights the pointlessness and pure malice that lies behind encouraging Sebastian (Farah Merani) to murder Alonso (Steven Burley) since Sebastian is not the King’s direct heir.
This is the first production I’ve seen where a director paid enough attention to the text to realize what effect Ariel has on the villains of the court party. Ariel (Madeleine Donohue) disguised as a harpy says to them: “I have made you mad; / And even with such-like valour men hang and drown / Their proper selves”. Usually, a director simply has the villains walk off in a trance. Here, Smith shows us that the three have gone insane. As Gonzalo says, “Their great guilt, / Like poison given to work a great time after, / Now 'gins to bite the spirits”. This point is important because it suggests that Prospero has gone too far in his revenge,
Smith, thus, emphasizes one of the most important aspects of the play. Too often directors are preoccupied with special effects in attempting to make Prospero’s island magical that they forget that Prospero comes to an important self-realization during the action. Speaking of the maddened villains, Ariel tells Prospero, “Your charm so strongly works 'em / That if you now beheld them, your affections / Would become tender”. At this Prospero wonders how a spirit like Ariel can pity their affliction and not he. At this realization he grasps the cruelty of his plan of revenge, “Do I take part: the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent, / The sole drift of my purpose doth extend / Not a frown further”.It is because of this change of heart that Prospero also resolves to give up magic, to “sink” his book of spells.
Smith, surprisingly, is able to stage Shakespeare’s play using only a cast of nine. Race- and gender-blind casting made much of in productions at Stratford, are here the norm. The most significant doubling Smith requires is for Madeleine Donohue who plays Trinculo also to play the spirit Ariel and for Peter van Gestel who plays Stephano also to play the “monster” Caliban. Smith accomplishes this by having both fantastic beings represented by puppets.
For Ariel, especially when so well played and sung by Donohue, this works quite well. Her Ariel is a puppet looking like a cross between a flame and bird on the end of a long pole. When Donohue must appear as Trinculo, another cast member wearing a mask wields the pole while Donohue does the voice.
One assumes that Smith is trying to show how Caliban diminishes himself in serving such unworthy masters as Stephano and Trinculo. The problem is that when Prospero humbles himself with the great statement about Caliban at the end, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”, Caliban is smaller than a plum and hardly seems like so great a thing to acknowledge. Having Caliban as a puppet may parallel Ariel, but Ariel is a spirit and Caliban is not.
His mother was a witch after all – a human witch one assumes – since that creates a parallel between Prospero the magician and Sycorax, Caliban’s mother. The more like a human being Caliban is the more the play gains a political meaning of a newly arrived race oppressing the race that previously dwelt there before their arrival. Prospero calls Caliban (Shakespeare’s anagram from “canibal”) a “savage” and claims, “But thy vile race, / Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures / Could not abide to be with”. Smith tries to assert the play’s political meaning at the very end, but it is too late. The use of a puppet, not to mention an amazing shrinking puppet, obscures an important aspect of the play and is the prime example where Smith, so unlike himself, obscures rather than uncovers the meaning of the play.
To have Caliban as a puppet also requires van Gestel to have long conversations with himself since he plays two characters who are so often on stage together. Van Gestel does try to distinguish the voices of the two, but they are not different enough not to be confusing. Having to play both makes it difficult for van Gestel to give a clear picture of Stephano, and, in general neither Donohue as Trinculo nor van Gestel as Stephano distinguish the worsening stages of the two servants’ drunkenness.
Campbell gives a fine performance as Prospero and clearly delineates the character’s changes of mood and the shock of discovering via Ariel his own inhumanity. Miriam Fernandes and Kaleb Alexander give a touch of grit to Miranda and Ferdinand so that the stereotypical lovers do not appear so bland. Christopher Darroch and Farah Merani easily radiate the malicious intent of the prime villains Antonio and Sebastian. Making Sebastian female also allows Smith a means of suggesting how Antonio intends to gain if Sebastian inherits Alonso’s wealth. Steven Burley’s Alonso tends too much toward bluster so that his grief at losing his son Ferdinand does not have the depth it should. Christina Gordon speaks Gonzalo’s speeches quite well, but she seems to think Gonzalo is a comic figure when, in fact, only the two villains view him as such.
Tom Lillington’s music, apparent inspired by the Swingle Singers, is a pleasure throughout. Even if one has reservations about certain aspects of the production, Smith and his cast get more of this magical play right than have companies with enormous budgets. Because of that, all the communities throughout Ontario should count themselves lucky to be on Driftwood’s Bard’s Bus Tour this summer.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Miriam Fernades and Richard Alan Campbell as Miranda and Prospero, ©2014 Johnny Cann; Christopher Darroch and Peter van Gestel as Caliban, ©2014 David Spowart.
For tickets, visit www.driftwoodtheatre.com/bards-bus-tour/bards-bus-tour-dates/.
2014-07-23
The Tempest