ABSTRACT
Right in front of the foot-lights stands “invisible” Prospero, back to the audience, watching the magic table covered by the enormous wings of Ariel-Harpia. While a terrified Alonso and the would-be regicides leave in panic, Ariel appears on stage. In his hand he is holding Harpia’s apparel. He cocks his head, drops a curtsy, smiles, awaiting praise. “Bravely … hast thou perform’d my Ariel,” Prospero cries from the audience. At the final rehearsal before opening night, Giorgio Strehler repeated that scene seven times. He pushed Prospero aside; none of his gestures seemed to him sufficiently expressive. Twice Strehler ran to congratulate Ariel and shake hands with him. The entire episode was only to elaborate a single line of Shakespeare’s text. On that night before the opening I saw two Tempests, one on the stage, where Prospero puts all the wonders and all the terrors of his theatrical magic into motion, and the other in the audience, where the last theater duke of Piccolo Teatro di Milano usurped the part of Prospero. Strehler directed that Tempest with his back to the stage and to his actors; in the enormous, still empty theater he was playing a magus to his first audience: his fellow-critics and a handful of friends. “Impossibile,” he was shouting, “if I manage to show half of The Tempest it will be a miracolo.” But which half? Prospero’s magic or the failure of it? The vanity and the power of an almighty director able to will the elements to obey him, or a bitter renunciation of an Art capable of recreating all of the world’s history but having no power to change it?
