This would continue. I saw this quite late in its run, and maybe the cast was having a bad night or something. But I've never seen a Shakespeare production that felt more like a long road trip--Dad, are we there yet? The Old Vic King Lear last year put running act and scene numbers at the top, which I thought was a mistake: Lear's a long play, and you sometime's looked up to see, oh god, we're only at III.2. The Tempest is a much shorter play, but this one went on endlessly, distended by a tendency to mistake pauses in dialogue for interpretation. There were just pauses throughout. Politely I would say that there was something democratic in making sure that every single scene got its due. But just slowing something down is not excuse for actually understanding it. I was spoiled by the Andrew Scott Hamlet earlier this summer--and his was in no sense a quick performance--but some of the scenes heere were just deadly. I dreaded every time Stefano opened his mouth: James Hayes spoke slowly and made sure that every dick joke--even those the play itself repeats several times--was telegraphed to the audience through a range of unsubtle businesses.
And Caliban. The Tempest nearly becomes a problem play in some interpretations, and in its way I was happy to see a colonial reading not be The Issue of the play. At the same time, making Caliban into a green, vaguely H.R. Geigery Santa Claus was the oddest punting of this issue I could imagine. (Did Sycorax fuck the Grinch or something?) I get that productions might not want to distend themselves with an issue that has informed Tempest productions for forty-odd years; however, I expected better than the vague insinuation that it wasn't easy being green.
Might as well deal with the special effects. I have no particular antipathy towards video projection. However, as someone young enough to play video games, I also sort of need video effects not to suck. This production's frequent moments of black magic were dominated by the sort of effects (the cracking of the earth, the summoning up of demons) I remember from video games in about 2007. Having paid for the Barbican, they might have sprung for better than an XBox 360.
The more positive visions, in contrast, reminded me of nothing so much as the video in Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games, minus a unicorn or two. A long projection effect filled the stage with peacocky things coalescing into vaguely rectal whorls.
And yeah, a few of these effects were great--although I'll note that the best tended to be slightly more traditional things, like the glowing effects built into the stage. I will modestly note that the colour saturation of video projection still isn't all that fantastic, yet--until this gets sorted, overly-pictorial productions will need to be careful lest they seem like giant screen savers or the background effects at a Sigur Ros concert. (At one point Propsero is surrounded by a swirling yellow ring, as though you had clicked on him in Warcraft.) I still think the most effective stage device was Trinculo's bicycle horn, which might have cost £6. And they seemingly couldn't afford a curtain for the discovery scene, which truly broke my heart: the actors just came on with a chessboard that then lit up, like in the video for One Night in Bangkok. I never, ever thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I missed the faint energy of those generic Dolce and Gabannish things the RSC were doing last year.
Oh, but the Telegraph liked the effects, if not so much the structure of an English sentence:
I couldn't tell if Simon Russell Beale was accessing his not particularly great dementia-addled Lear or was simply sort of sleepwalking grumpily through the end of his time in this production. He was somehow convinced to give a shit in exactly two scenes, and it nearly cracked the play open. Responding to Ariel's "If I were human," he seemed genuinely to pause; in the next scene, overcome by rage in the middle of his daughter's vision of happiness, his angry sadness tore the undersaturated onstage pageant to shreds. This made me angry in turn--it pointed towards what the production might have been. By the conclusion he was back to seeming a bit bored. The final soliloquy, which (real talk) I think is basically holy, again substituted pauses for interpretation: he'd say a few lines, wait for a bit, then say a few more. He practically shrugged, by the end. Around him were some non-decision interpretations. Miranda was played like Gabrielle, Xena's wan but spunky lifetime companion; I remember one moment of Antonio fixing his hair more than any other aspect of his performance. Ceres sang like Enya; the music sounded like Yanni. Sail away, sail away.
Maybe it's the shitty time and the shitty politics, but I noticed that this was a very obedient production. Prospero's manfeels about getting old tear up his child's happiness, without anything really happening as a result--Gabrielle doesn't even get to look sad about it. Ariel's team of sprites curtsey when they put on his Milanese cloak--indeed it takes four young people, working as a team, to remove his garment. This was an uncritical Prospero for the Trump White House, with his overtanned daughter, evident fear of aging, and undersaturated dreams of flame and terror.
Not that this has anything to do with the production, but on the way out one of the young men behind me--exactly the sort of bored posh accent you'd expect--said, to his ghastly friends, "One of them couldn't act. The black dude, the older one." (Joseph Mydell was in fact fine as Gonzalo, the definition of an unforgiving Shakespearean part: this sort of island Polonius, well-meaning and repetitive.) I grant no particular importance to the opinions of my younger social superiors; a man could go mad. But at the end of this particular evening, I was furious, all the way back to Moorgate Station. I'm not saying audiences need to be awed into silence by a noble Caliban, every time; but this points towards the essential frivolity with which this play addressed most of the play's potential issues.
