30 Days of Shakespeare, Day 21

[lareinenoire]

Day #21: An overrated play

I'm probably going to end up burning in Shakespeare Hell for this, but The Tempest really doesn't do anything for me. I can, to an extent, appreciate it -- the language and the imagery are positively gorgeous -- but I don't love it, and I doubt I ever will.



And it's not even the dodgy colonialist issues bothering me on the same visceral level that the gender issues in Taming of the Shrew bother me, although I suspect that would probably be a more understandable reason than '...meh, it just doesn't grab me.' But the latter phrase does more or less encapsulate my problem with The Tempest. I like individual moments in the play, and Prospero's speeches in the second half are magnificently crafted. But, as fuunsaiki remarked, quoting Rupert Goold:

I'm afraid I rather agreed with him as I, too, had always found the lack of narrative energy, the absence of threat to Prospero and the general Robinson Crusoe atmosphere pretty dull in performance myself.

I was in a student production in undergrad that did make me like the play more than I had beforehand (I played Sebastian, if anybody's curious). The fact that it was a fully genderswitched production also brought out some interesting tensions, but overall I agree with Goold that there's really no sense of urgency to the play. Antonio and Sebastian just sort of bumble around, and although you can infuse characters like Ariel and Caliban with a great deal of dangerous energy, it's never quite supported by a text that has them under Prospero's control.

It is entirely possible that I might appreciate The Tempest more as I get older and spend more time teaching Shakespeare. But right now, it just doesn't capture me the way many of his other plays do.




Day #1: Your favourite play - Othello and Richard III
Day #2: Your favourite character - Lady Elizabeth Grey in 3 Henry VI and Richard III
Day #3: Your favourite hero - Othello
Day #4: Your favourite heroine - Juliet from Romeo and Juliet and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing
Day #5: Your favorite villain - Richard of Gloucester
Day #6: Your favourite villainess female villain - Joan la Pucelle
Day #7: Your favourite clown - Feste from Twelfth Night
Day #8: Your favourite comedy - Much Ado About Nothing
Day #9: Your favourite tragedy - King Lear
Day #10: Your favourite history - The Henry VI trilogy
Day #11: Your least favourite play - The Taming of the Shrew
Day #12: Your favourite scene - selections from Richard III, Othello, Much Ado, and 3 Henry VI
Day #13: Your favourite romantic scene - As You Like It, Act IV, Scene I
Day #14: Your favourite fight scene - 1 Henry IV and 3 Henry VI
Day #15: The first play you read - Romeo and Juliet
Day #16: Your first play you saw - Macbeth
Day #17: Your favourite speech - Romeo and Juliet and 3 Henry VI
Day #18: Your favourite dialogue - Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet
Day #19: Your favourite movie version of a play - Richard III (1995)
Day #20: Your favourite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favourite couple
Day #27: Your favourite couplet
Day #28: Your favourite joke
Day #29: Your favourite sonnet
Day #30: Your favourite single line

Comments

[halflingmerry.livejournal.com]

::laughs:: My two most recent projects are your least favorite! But I agree!

(I actually got great satisfaction from and affection for "Shrew" while playing Katherina, and figured out an acceptable way to do so for my own politics/morality without changing anything in the show itself, including my sketchy estimation of WS's intentions. But can go into that later—maybe even on the appropriate post.)

I'm playing Ariel in "Tempest" right now. And while I'm absolutely loving the experience because we have a great cast and great director, writing-wise, I absolutely agree with you. The structure of the show is seriously defective. How is anyone supposed to pay attention to 13-pages of exposition all front-loaded?! Then the ending just falls in drive and energy like whoa and the audience falls asleep again. I think we've found ways to be entertaining, but most of the text is seriously (and unusually for WS) performance-dependent rather than inherently dynamic.

Did I mention, Trinculo, Caliban and Stephano are the only ones with immediately tangible, character-driven dialogue! (Lucky bastards!) (...Okay, okay, Ferdy and Miranda, but as previously stated, they're a bit... loverlike ;-) ) Everything else can be made character-driven with varying degrees of effort, but... man. I'm pretty good at memorizing lines, and metered Classical more easily than contemporary because it's more like a song; but I had the damndest time with my lines as Ariel because it's all procedural!! We found the character stuff, but... I guess Shakespeare tends to spoil us by handing us so much on a platter without the usual "how do I make this make sense?" part of the acting process. With "Tempest" one really does have to start making stuff up to make the characters come alive.

What I do like about the show is how each character set, and each scene, is smack out of a different one of his plays, in references, subject matter, even pace and tone. I like drifting through scenes and finding myself walking from "Lear" to "As You Like It" to "Midsummer". And yes, the language itself is beautiful. (Though surely that makes it more of a poem than a play...)

Hehe, like some other comments, we have some gender-switching going on: Ariel, Sebastian (Sebastienne), Gonzalo, and Trinculo are wimminz. I absolutely agree: it adds so much to some of the scenes (esp. Sebastienne/Antonio) and sometimes seems like it couldn't possibly have been played any other way (Trinculo/Stephano—"If thou'rt Stephano touch me!" / "Thy lordship shall have it!" / "I swim like a duck I'll be sworn!" "Thou'rt more like a goose!" ::gooses her:: "Ohoho!! Stephano! Hast any more of this?" "The whole butt, man!!" <—Yes, yes, I know they're talking about the liquor, but it just works so well when they're not...)

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. Double-entendres all over the place! It was a play that was quite fun to perform, but every time I've tried to read it, it just sort of lies flat.

And I'd have loved to see your take on Katherine!