Comparative to Little Angel’s Tempest which I saw in Stratford in March, this one was less about magic and wonder and instead showcased a much darker aspect. Which is one of the thing’s I love so much about the play, I find it a very rich, deep experience that can carry and be enriched by a wide variety of interpretations.
A good example of these contrasting possibilities is represented in the character of Prospero himself – whether you present him as a master manipulator, a benevolent misfortunate leader, a twinkly eyed Merlin or an utterly flawed man. In Cheek By Jowl’s version, Igor Yasulovich, presented with a cold, bitter despot – hard, manipulative and powerful. Even his treatment of Miranda, sometimes shown as his only point of humanity, is here presented as roughly abusive. There was no attempt to make him a sympathetic character and I always sort of like that in Shakespeare’s central characters (like Lear), particularly given the fact that Prospero has been laden so long with the baggage of being the representation of Shakespeare himself (not an interpretation I subscribe to).
Cheek by Jowl are well known for this ability to strip the text of acquired expectations, focusing instead on fresh and intensive examination of the text. Miranda too, played by Anya Khalilulina, benefited highly from this approach, coming much closer to how I imagine the character. Innocent and impetuous, childlike, instinctive, wild and unmannered – with no concept of court or social values. Whilst I have seen other performances that took something close to this approach, I have never before seen a production that builds an affectionate, sibling relationship between Miranda and Caliban. I thought it was a truly transformative decision and particularly changed the ending of the play into something much colder and more tragic than I have seen before (and I regularly cry at the end of the Tempest). Here it was hauntingly horrid watching as Miranda was dragged away from her childhood playmate, the image lingering long after the play had finished and stripping it of all sentimentality. Instead we were left with the abandonment of Caliban and Arial, a certain despair for Miranda’s future and the dark knowledge of the barely hidden anger still simmering beneath Prospero’s words of forgiveness. It is difficult to imagine that this conclusion leads to any sort of happy ending.
How they handle Arial, and magic more widely, is of course another important choice in any production of the play. Here, though they can’t quite live up to the first Arial I fell in love with, Atandwa Kani but despite initial Christian Camargo costume flashbacks (minus the ballgown) – I ended up really loving Andrey Kuzichev’s interpretation. He became the conscious, beating heart of the play – often a role given to Miranda – genuinely sympathetic to the captured and enchanting in his slowly dawning humanity when presented with all its capacity for love and grief.
I also loved the way they handled the magic – especially the use of multiple Arial’s both at the beginning and later, manipulating the characters and playing instruments, weaving the music throughout. I liked too Arial’s ability to step outside the world of the play into the darkness of the auditorium – though I felt this was rather robbed of power later when other characters began to do likewise. My favourite decision though had to be the way they reduced Prospero’s side of the magic to much smaller, tiny gestures filled with strain – clenched fists and a tense cheek. It made it, oddly enough, feel much more momentous and impressive than any wildly wielded staff could.
The effect of the storm too was impressive – with the swinging of doors creating the sense of the building tempest, heightened by the lighting and, for the first time in my memory, the use of actual water on stage (at least when it comes to The Tempest as I have been to Singin’ In The Rain). In fact the attention to detail of having the shipwrecked characters soaked throughout the show, really blew me away (how is it I’ve never seen a production do this before), as did the image of Ferdinand hanging upside down “swimming” in a doorway. The storm felt much more real here, a reminder throughout of both Prospero’s power and the underlying if mis-attributed grief– a shattering event in the characters lives that the audience is not allowed, wonderfully, to forget. It also led to one of the more memorable Trinculo entrances that I’ve seen.
The storm also highlighted one of Cheek By Jowl’s other great strengths – their finely tuned use of physicality, choreography and staging to represent their ideas and enhance their storytelling. This is also benefited by their ability to portray with great clarity the emotional lives of their characters. These elements mean that you quickly forget that the dialogue is entirely in Russian and soon begin to ignore the surtitles. This divorce from dialogue also, I believe, allows you to focus on the minutiae of a production and in cases like this are entirely rewarded by the experience.
The attention to these elements leads to some wonderful staging choices. I particularly loved how they displayed one of my favourite moments in the play – when Arial asks “Do you love me master?” – usually I’ve seen it occur when only Prospero and Arial are on the stage – here it was awash with activity and crowded, with everybody talking over each other – and then everything stilled for a moment as if Arial was holding his breath and making the island do likewise. I also, like everyone else, loved the way the log scene was performed with Arial replacing the logs – it was a moment laced with homoeroticism and became an important point in Arial’s journey towards humanity, as well as in the central love story.
All of which would have made me love this, but they went one step further and did the one thing that nearly always catapults productions into my lists of absolutely favourite Shakespeare productions. They focused clearly upon the two families in the play – showing who they are, what defines them, how they were different and how they shaped the characters as people. This is why I loved The Globes Henry IV plays last year and it’s what makes the RSC’s Romeo and Juliet with its crazy Capulets and Lear, where each of his relationships with his daughters was carefully drawn, work for me. We are the products of our upbringings.
Here the families are both mirrors to themselves and mirrors of each other. If you want to understand what Prospero is like at the height of his influence, you can see it in the performance of Evgeny Samarin as Antonio (my favourite of a highly skilled set of actors) – in his smoothness, his anger, his disgust and his loss at the end. One of my favourite memories of the production is of watching him walk away from the final conciliations (when I have seen the character so often forgotten) and sink bitterly against the wall, lighting a cigarette. Most of all you see what this family is like in the way he cleverly and coldly manipulates Sebastian (Pavel Kuzmin), another element of the production latent with homoeroticism.
Likewise in Sebastian and the Naples family you see a contrast with those from Milan. These are not cold manipulators, they are rough and ready, impetuous but warm. Despite his plotting, you sense genuine relief and joy from Sebastian as he discovers Ferdinand’s survival. They are not perfect, there is a hint of lustful violence in Ferdinand’s initial interactions with Miranda that suggest she may be used and soon forgotten (though also, oddly, that given her own personality – she might be able to forge a place for herself within the family). In both families, strong and flawed in different ways, the separate elements felt like they belonged together and informed the whole. I loved it, you certainly could have had a successful production without this detail, but it’s what really set this above and apart for me.
Utterly entrancing from start to finish and proving that new analysis of Shakespeare’s plays has the potential to be highly rewarding.
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