Within the Bermuda Triangle: Reflections on Recent Tempests

Abstract

In the late summer/fall of 1988, four productions of The Tempest were on view virtually at the same time in England: Sir Peter Hall’s at the National Theatre, with Michael Bryant as Prospero; Jonathan Miller’s at the Old Vic, with Max von Sydow; Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl company, with Timothy Walker; and Nicholas Hytner’s for the RSC, with John Wood. These productions, all of a high order, show The Tempest as remaining in the inner repertory of Shakespeare, that part of the canon most charged with meaning today. But there is no single aspect of these productions that calls attention to itself as new, as radically changed from the recent past. Stage history can evolve through a striking new production that changes our perception of the play — Peter Brook’s King Lear (RSC, 1962), say, or Peter Hall’s Henry V (RSC, 1964). More often though meanings will change gradually over the years, with no outstanding production to which one can point as a milestone. This is so with The Tempest. There is not, I believe, a single production in the past generation that could be described as ‘revolutionary’; and yet our sense of the play in performance has changed greatly. Hence I want to offer not a collective review of the major productions of 1988, but some reflections on the play’s essences as they now appear on stage. They appear above all in the casting and playing of the three main parts, and the relationships within this triangle.