THEATRE
Well refreshed
HILARY SPURLING
The Tempest (Mermaid) Home (Royal Court) In 1610, the year before The Tempest was first performed in London, news filtered back from the New World of the 'Sea Ven- ture', the Virginia company's flagship long since accounted lost in a storm off the West Indies. Not only had the admiral, the col- ony's new governor and all aboard the ship been miraculously preserved; the 'dangerous and dreaded' Bermudas, islands commonly believed to be 'given over to devils and wicked spirits', turned out to be an earthly paradise where, for nine months, the castaways had been 'well refreshed, com- forted and with good satiety contented.'
Jonathan Miller's production of The Tem- pest pins one sharply in mind of this little band of shipwrecked Europeans. Alonso and his courtiers first appear at the top of a mound so steep that they seem to drift down it: sober seventeenth century gentlemen in black spilling dreamily across the stage like sand blown before the wind. They are half- bewildered, half-enraptured by an island which Seems to them, as the Bermudas seemed to Shakespeare's contemporaries, 'a most prodigious and enchanted place': and they are almost immediately discontented. They scarcely listen to the old courtier, Gonzalo's, proposals for founding an ideal commonwealth; no sooner have they grsped the possibilities of this magical new world, than they fall—much as the 'Sea Venture's' company did—to plotting murder.
It will be hard, after Mr Miller's pro- duction, ever again to see The Tempest as the fairytale to which we are ac- customed—or indeed to see it in any other terms than as Shakespeare's account, prosaic and prophetic, of the impact of the Old World on the...New : a confrontation which, beginning in amazed delight, moves so swiftly to drawn swords and 'bloody thoughts' that the opening storm seems only a prelude in a minor key to the 'tempest of dissension' that sweeps Prospero's island.
The storm itself (an affair of creaking ropes, flickering spotlights and bawling sailors which, being the only conventional thing in this production, is also the least plausible) is not impressive. The sense of Perturbation, of marauders at large in a miraculously ordered paradise, is suggested rather, by implication, in our first sight of an apparition so strange, so still, so utterly unlike any previous - notion of a Shakespearian heroine that it is for once not difficult to believe that Ferdinand should take her for a goddess. Angela Pleasence's Miranda, barefoot, hair falling lank and straight behind her ears, in a necklace of beads or berries and a bleached cotton pet- ticoat, is as wild as an Indian girl confronted for the first time with white men. She is grave, pale, ungainly and -as unnatural as her freakish upbringing. Pity and pain are new to her, convulsing her whole body; she listens to Prospero's account of her own history with the strenuous concentration seen sometimes on the wizened faces of very young babies; and I have never seen anything remotely like her love scenes with Ferdinand, in which each holds for the other an unimagined beauty.
But, if this production is imbued with a powerful sense of the unknown, the known world is as strange: Europe through Miran- da's eyes—the world of Neapolitain politics, intrigue and treachery--seems as weird as her father's island to the intruders who despoil it. Not that Prospero's rule over a subject people—Mr Miller has both Ariel and Caliban played by West Indians—is wholly idyllic. Norman Beaton's aloof and graceful Ariel is easily controlled by threats; Caliban only with extreme brutality. It is very clear that Prospero wields that absolute power (whether through magic wand or magic bullet is, after all, immaterial to natives who have neither) which Gonzalo proposed to use for the benefit of an 'in- nocent people' But then again, in Shakespeare's new world there are no innocent people. Caliban, who would have raped Miranda, licks Tim- cub's foot foot in hopes of murdering his master. If the first appearance of Rudolph Walker's tattered, grovelling Caliban is frightening enough, there is something distinctly ominous about the dignity with which he turns on those who fondled him and taught him English, and who now abhor him as a 'slave Whom stripes may move pot kindness.' The sexual root of Prospero's vin- dictiveness, Miranda's fear of Caliban's 'vile race', informs this sobering scene which plainly bears on questions—`Can the leopard change his spots? Can a savage remaining savage be civil?'—that perplexed the English in Virginia.
It is Mr Miller's emphasis on this side of the play, grounded in the solid and known world, which establishes the supernatural so readily in his production: Graham Crowden's Prospero, though barelegged, wild-eyed and bearded like Columbus, is still beneath his magical striped cotton robe a substantial Jacobean gentleman. His justice is exacting, his rewards and punishments scrupulously weighed. One has from this glittering performance not only an imposing gravity but also a sense of what it costs Prospero, in difficulty and pain, as though he were rolling a great stone up a hill : the stone is the weight of his authority, which stands alone against chaos as Sir Thomas Yates's did in the Bermudas: 'In these dangers and devilish disquiets . .. into what a mischief and misery had we been given up, had we not had a governor to have suppressed the same?' The suave and barbarous Neapolitains, the coarse seamen urged on to mutiny by Caliban, threaten a peace held only in the nicest balance.
This precarious stillness is achieved without apparent effort in calm, formal pat- terns of extreme simplicity; the courtiers swirling down the mound (it says much for this production that it overcomes even the distressing ugliness of John Collins's set), Arid stalking up it to raise harpies, hell- hounds, a baroque masque of ladies at once courtly and exotic. Each murderous crisis which looms add is averted disturbs an at- mosphere as hushed as though a breath were held over the whole island: Alonso and his court reach with greed and fear written in their faces for a banquet suspended invisibly above the stalls, Trinculo and Stefano grab- bing for loot are pinioned by Arid in a loop of rope, -the whole party is at last im- mobilised in Prospero's magic circle. It is a resolution—and Mr Crowden gives his last speeches an extraordinary beauty—by no means without danger, and one which is unreal only in so far as it both contains and looks beyond Shakespeare's world and ours. This is the third time in nine months that Mr Miller has stripped away banalities, misconceptions, received ideas, like layers of old varnish, to restore a pristine clarity to Shakespeare, and it is a truly formidable achievement.
Which is more than can be said for David Storey's Home, a sadly tedious tale set in a mental home (where else?) which meticulously imitates Beckett's hackneyed surface while failing wholly to discern the intellectual and emotional depths beneath. But, though the play has neither the delicacy nor wit of Mr Storey's The Contractor, it should nonetheless be seen for the superb performances of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as a pair of vacuous and maundering wrecks in the last stages of decrepitude. The production is directed by Mr Lindsay Anderson.
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