I don't normally manage to see two productions of the same play in one day. Yesterday I was at a matinee of The Tempest with puppets at the Little Angel Theatre in Islington, then in the evening at the Barbican for a modern dress version in Russian. Yes, you can do almost anything with Shakespeare if you know how.
The Little Angel's puppet version, a joint work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, held an audience of children and adults silently spellbound for over an hour, with not a single display of fidgeting. I was drawn to this production after seeing the two companies collaborate four years ago on a puppet version of Venus and Adonis. The Tempest, without the directorial skill of Gregory Doran, doesn't quite hit the same heights, but it's very enjoyable. It relies on a versatile company of actors who can sing, act, and manipulate puppets with equal skill. Caliban is a greenish reptile, a bit like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (remember them?) and Ariel is a much smaller airborne puppet in more traditional style. In general the puppetry scenes work the best, lifting the play away from the realistic conventions imposed by the human body. I liked Jonathan Dixon's work with Caliban and Anneika Rose's performance as Miranda.
Down the road at the Barbican's Silk Street Theatre, The Tempest becomes Burya in Declan Donnellan's extraordinarily exciting version for his Moscow-based Cheek By Jowl ensemble, who have previously performed Twelfth Night, Three Sisters and Boris Godunov in London. As always, Donnellan stretches the meaning of Shakespeare's words in unfamiliar ways without ever ignoring them or implying that he could have done better himself. Nick Ormerod's design, as always, is restrained but effective, relying on a panel of three flats with doors at the back of the stage, doubling as a back-projection screen. These Russian actors take risks together in ways that almost always pay off; the play opens with Prospero (Igor Yasulovich), an elderly man in trousers, belt and braces, sitting in silence on an upturned plastic crate, concentrating on something happening in the distance. Gradually the sound and flashes of a mighty storm take over, but Prospero's focus never wavers. It's a mesmerising and totally unsentimental interpretation of the role, which makes the exiled Duke into a control freak. His island is a violent place where he and his daughter exchange cuffs and slaps, and where the visiting Fernando is enslaved like Caliban.
There are dozens of original touches which illuminate the meaning of the play -- the conspirators sharing a furtive cigarette as they plan the murder of the King of Naples, Caliban treasuring the skull of his mother the witch, Fernando carrying not logs but the rigid body of Ariel on his back, Trinculo adjusting a dinky leather man-bag across his shoulder, Stephano taking a newly-enriched-Muscovite's pleasure in a cigar and a mobile phone. Fernando and Miranda, far from being innocents at large, are determined to get each other's knickers off as fast as possible. Any Khalilulina's portrayal of Miranda as a feisty, knowing young woman rather than a shy child on the verge of womanhood stretches the text to its limit, but fits well with the rest of the production. Often in The Tempest the scenes with the King of Naples and his scheming courtiers can be a bit tedious, but here they crackle with tension and are actually the most interesting part of the play. This is a very Russian production, with some excellent visual nods towards the Soviet past , including a chorus of men in suits standing on a podium like the politburo members on the Lenin mausoleum (take my word for it, I was there and saw them). The masque scene attached to the betrothal of Miranda and Fernando becomes a comic Stalin-era collective farm celebration in which cheerful peasants prance around with sickles, suddenly cut short by a shout from Prospero. The lights go up in the auditorium and the famous line 'our revels now are ended' illuminates exactly what is meant by theatrical illusion. Prospero has no staff to play with; his earthly powers are internal, not external, and the final uplifting message of the play is that what counts in the battle to be human is mastery of oneself, not mastery of others. I have never seen the play's theme so clearly illustrated. This is a wonderful production which reaffirms Donnellan's status as our greatest Shakespearean director since the legendary Peter Brook.
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