The Tempest at the Old Globe

If you are in or near San Diego this summer, I urge you to see Shakespeare’s Tempest in the production directed by Adrian Noble, now in repertory at the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre of the Old Globe in Balboa Park. It is the most magically moving Tempest I have seen, perhaps ever.

Combining exquisite clarity of language and acting with tastefully strange original music, compelling stage effects, and a generous trust in the audience’s capacity to grasp what is intended, the production becomes a beautiful and translucent medium of Shakespeare’s complex and profound meanings. In the face of so moving a production, the flaws—one incompetent and one miscast (or misdirected) actor, one misinterpretation, and some bits of staging—shrink into insignificance.

Miles Anderson as Prospero was truly impressive, mostly because of his superb mastery of Shakespeare’s language and the supple variety of his speech. Ben Diskant’s Ariel and Jonno Roberts’ Caliban were forceful, clear, and moving. Diskant is also a fine singer and musician and a competent dancer. Roberts’ intensity and mastery of variations of tone rendered almost negligible his occasional tendency to introduce distracting pauses in his speech, apparent too in his portrayal of Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing (also in repertory at the Old Globe). Charles Janasz, as usual, gives a flawless performance as Gonzalo. Adrian Sparks as Stephano and John Cariani as Trinculo could hardly have been better. Donald Carrier (Alonzo), Michael Stewart Allen (Sebastian), and Anthony Cochrane (Antonio) were clear and effective in every way, and Grayson DeJesus superbly and movingly delivered Francisco’s most important speech about Ferdinand’s survival.

Would that Ferdinand had lived up to Francisco’s image of him. But alas, the two serious flaws in the production were the acting of the young lovers. Kevin Alan Daniels (who also plays Claudio in Much Ado) has not managed to transcend the amateur actor’s temptation to get in the way of Shakespeare’s speech with false pauses for petty dramatic effect, improper stresses on pronouns, and cutesy gestures, all of which obstruct or distract from the meaning of his words. In general he played Ferdinand as a likeable kind of nincompoop instead of as a royal prince overwhelmed by magic and love.

Opposite him, Winslow Corbett was an equal disappointment as Miranda. In place of a young virgin to be wondered at for her beauty, modesty, superior education, and compassion, Corbett’s Miranda sounded like what Shakespeare elsewhere calls a “self-willed harlotry.” She delivers her first lines not in compassionate concern for the victims of the shipwreck but in the voice of an angry virago screaming at her hitherto virtuous father. In the rest of the play she speaks in the voice of a fishwife. I don’t know whether feminism has entered into the interpretation of her character or whether Adrian Noble means anger to run in the family or whether Ms. Corbett herself simply cannot imagine what a modest young maiden ought to sound like, but her enactment of Miranda robbed the production of a measure of its loveliness. It was a therefore a double relief when the lovers’ kisses stopped their mouths.

There were minor bits of distraction in the staging: Ariel’s stilts stole focus from a portion of the Stephano-Trinculo comedy, and Ferdinand’s stage business from an exchange between Prospero and Miranda. But the only significant objection I had was that Prospero was portrayed as in general more angry than the play warrants. Though the text supports moments of righteous anger toward Caliban and Antonio, the fact remains that unlike Sycorax, who was a goetist—a black-magic-wielding witch—Prospero is a theurgist, a white magician, whose magical powers can have been developed only through his virtuous mastery of himself. He is not in general a vengeful and angry man who comes to a turning point in his life and thereafter achieves virtue. He is rather a virtuous man who at one point—namely in Act IV, Scene i—experiences a temptation to angry vengeance, of which the immediate aftermath and sign of his temporary weakness is his moment of bleak melancholy expressed in perhaps the most famous speech in the play:

The cloud-capped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temple, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

What makes me say that the hint of despair here is a momentary aberration and not the summary wisdom of Prospero’s life? He says so:

Sir, I am vexed.

Bear with my weakness: my old brain is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity. . . .

A turn or two I’ll walk

To still my beating mind.

In the words I have italicized we see not a lifelong characteristic but the momentary distemperature of a usually composed and virtuous man laboring under the pressure of an imminent attack (for the second time) on his life. His rising to the ultimate virtue of forgiveness in the next scene is not therefore the transformation of a flawed character but the fulfillment of a virtuous one.

That said, none of my objections were enough to disturb the magical beauty and moving power of the play in this production. Gonzalo’s utopian dream of a purely good natural world, which cannot by the law of reality come to pass, gives way to his prayer in response to the revelation of a world redeemed from its flaws:

Look down, you gods,

And on this couple drop a blesséd crown!

For it is you that have chalked forth the way

Which brought us hither. . . .

Was Milan thrust from Milan that his issue

Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice

Beyond a common joy, and set it down

With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage

Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,

And Ferdinand her brother found a wife

Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own.

By the time of Prospero’s epilogue, the entire audience was swept up into the transcendent harmony of the ending—vengeance redeemed by virtue, bondage by freedom, lust by love, nature by grace, and suffering by joy.

See it if you can.