A Brave New Tempest *

The Tempest, as directed by Sanford Robbins for the Professional Theater Training Program at the University of Delaware in December 1991, was as much a brave new world for me as for Miranda. New because it made me feel that I was seeing the play for the first time. Brave, in Miranda’s sense of the word, because it was stunning to look at; brave, also, in that it dared to take a positive view of a play that most recent productions have treated rather bleakly. Stephen Orgel’s admirable introduction to his Oxford edition of the play (1987) claims that the theater is still dominated by the “traditional sentimental” productions—that is, those that present Prospero as a basically “good” magician and the play’s final reconciliation as a genuinely happy ending. ¹ This may be true; neverthless, among the genuinely interesting versions of the play that I can recall from some thirty years of theatergoing, only two seemed to me to take this view. The first was Ron Daniels’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company (1982–83) with Derek Jacobi as a saddened but apparently hopeful Prospero; the other was Peter Brook’s at the Bouffes-du-Nord in Paris (1990–91), where the tall African Prospero (Sotigui Kouyaté) hummed gently to himself as he placed his magic stones in a circle, never doubting his ability to change the universe by sheer mental power. Apart from these, the productions that were for me most memorable have emphasized not Prospero’s forgiveness but his aged bitterness (John Gielgud, directed by Peter Hall in 1973), his tyrannical colonialism (Graham Crowden and Max von Sydow in the two London productions by Jonathan Miller in 1970 and 1988), the deeply sinful nature of his dabbling in magic (Michael Bryant at the National Theatre, directed by Peter Hall, 1989), or his comical human fallibility (John Wood, directed by Nicholas Hytner, 1990). Some directors have even treated the whole play as a compensatory revenge fantasy: Prospero has been an exiled ruler forever brooding on his wrongs and imagining ways of returning to his lost kingdom (Bill Wallis in Michael Bogdanov’s productions at Leicester in 1976 and London in 1979) or a director forcing actors to improvise in accord with his changing moods (Timothy Wright in Declan Donnelan’s, Cheek by Jowl production in 1988).