Prospero's

Prosperos True Preservers Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeares The
Tempest
Arthur Horowitz
Newark: University of Delaware Press
Prosperos True Preservers
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Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeares The Tempest
Arthur Horowitz
Newark: University of Delaware Press
2004 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specic clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-854-X/04 $10.00 8 pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horowitz, Arthur, 1945 Prosperos true preservers : Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehlertwentieth-century directors approach Shakespeares The tempest / Arthur Horowitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87413-854-X (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. Tempest. 2. TheaterProduction and directionHistory20th century. 3. Shakespeare, William, 15641616Stage history1950 4. Shakespeare, William, 15641616Dramatic production. 5. Strehler, Giorgio, 1921 6. Ninagawa, Yukio. 7. Brook, Peter. 8. Tragicomedy. I. Title. PR2833.H67 2004 792.9 2dc22 2003021625
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
Acknowledgments 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The Possibilities of The Tempest Giorgio Strehler: The Tempest, 1948 Peter Brook: The Tempest, 1957 Peter Brooks Experiment: The 1968 Tempest Giorgio Strehler, 1978 The No Tempest: Yukio Ninagawa, 1988 Peter Brook: The Tempest, 1990 The Boy in the Sandbox 7 11 22 44 64 88 113 143 164 170 182 199 219
Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
Acknowledgments CERTAINLY I AM NOT THE FIRST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT A BOOK OF

this sort is not the work of just the writer. Rather, it is the culmination of a long process and the consistent support, encouragement, and assistance of readers, advisors, friends and family. I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of those people who have contributed to this work and to acknowledge the enormous debt of gratitude I owe them. Firstly, I want to thank Professor Ruby Cohn. No one could possibly have a ner advisor, advocate and friend in working on scholarship in theatre than Ruby. I will be forever in her debt and my admiration and affection for this remarkable woman is limitless. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Joanne Laer, who piloted me through the early stages of this work, and has remained a dear friend and encouraging supporter of its completion. Dr. Antonella Bassi of the Italian Department of the University of California, Davis has also done me many acts of kindness. Her willingness to serve as liaison between the Theatre Piccolo in Milan and myself was of great help. I wish to thank these two wonderful women for their time, effort, and warmth of spirit. During my visit to the Theatre Piccolo, I was met with great generosity. I would especially like to thank Rosanna Purchia, Franco Viespro, and Federica Santambrogio for assisting me in the accumulation of the information I sought and for making me feel so welcome during the time I spent in Milan. Sincere thanks also go to those who so willingly helped me in the gathering of the research tools I needed in order to complete this work. Dr. Aviv Orani was most generous in sharing information with me. My dear friends Dr. Kiki Gounaridou, Dr. Joel Talsey, Harry Rubeck, Barbara Hodgen and Pip Simmons all went to trouble on my behalf, providing me with telephone numbers, documents, videotapes, news articles, and assistance with 7
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
translations, all of which saved me hundreds of hours of research and legwork. To them all, I am most grateful. I would also like to thank two old friendsMichael Dattorre and Jim Collinsmy co-managing directors of the fantasy Shakespearean baseball team, the Stratford Swans. Michael and Jim rst showed me the pure joy to be found in Shakespeare on the page and stage. For this and many other reasons, I thank them and I love them. I was amazed by the generosity of the members of the acting community who willingly talked about the productions of the Tempest they performed in with the directors who are the centerpiece of this book. Brian Bedford, Yoshi Oida, Giulia Lazzerini, and the late Tino Carraro were all engaging conversationalists and great fun to interview. I want to thank my mother, Sylvia Horowitz, and my late father, Isaac, for instilling in me both a love of learning and the value to be gained by seeing a project through to its completion, and my in-laws, Donald and Nelle Bixler, for their generous support, encouragement and love. Finally, I want to thank the person to whom this book is dedicated, my dear wife, Carol Bixler. Carol is my best friend, my advocate, my inspiration, and my love. This dedication is to acknowledge the support that she has been to me. Without Carols help, encouragement, support, wit, and intelligence I would have found any number of reasons to quit long ago. With her guidance, devotion and dedication, it is now, nally, complete.
Look! I made a hat . . . Where there never was a hat . . . (from Sunday in the Park with George Stephen Sondheim)
1
The Possibilities of The Tempest
The Tempest . . . is a play whose charms crack not (5.1.2), its protean nature nding ever new ways to voice contemporary social, political and cultural concerns and to voice them powerlly. Christine Dymkowski, Shakespeare in Performance: The Tempest To describe how the theatre subjects texts and performers to its process is a daunting challenge . . . W. B. Worthen, Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism
THIS WILL BE A STUDY OF SIX PRODUCTIONS OF THE TEMPEST STAGED

each decade since World War II. Their three directors are Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Yukio Ninagawa, all of whom have had vast experience in staging Shakespeare.1 Of these six productions, only Peter Brooks 1957 production was performed in its original language, approximating the text as Shakespeare wrote it. Three other languages are represented hereItalian, Japanese, and Frenchin modern translations that were created specically for their productions. The most experimental of these stagings, Brooks 1968 production, was largely in English (with a smattering of French and Japanese). That production used only ten percent of the text of The Tempest, consisting in large part of variations and exercises based upon themes from the play. None of these productions shows anything close to letter delity to Shakespeares text. My inquiry into these productions will be through something of a bifocal lens. In part, it will be a historical reading of these performances, regarding them in the light of the postmodern, postcolonial environment that produced and/or provoked them. But this study will also be focusing upon the stage director as the 11
12
PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS
controlling agent within the creative process, observing how the dynamics that go into directing a production of The Tempest turn its director into Prosperos surrogate within the theatrical exchange. It is altogether possible that this blurring of the roles and responsibilities of the director and Prospero can be traced back to the text of the play itself. In line 170 of act 5, scene 1 of The Tempest, Prospero prepares to dazzle those onstage with his pyrotechnic ability. Bring forth a wonder, to content ye, he proclaims. This is the voice of Prospero, the theatrical impresario. Supremely condent in the power of his art, Prospero is not afraid to build upon audience expectation of his stage effects. Prosperos ability to conjure magical storms, banquets, and masques is vital to his role as controller of elements, orchestrator of events, and manipulator of human behavior. With the changing dynamics of theater in the twentieth century, the directors ascent to the role of chief artistic force in the theatrical exchange placed him, more than ever, in the position of Prospero. It is a chief reason why The Tempest becomes so provocative a play to use as the paradigm for studying directorial approaches to staging Shakespeare. While interviewing Jonathan Miller for his book, On Directing Shakespeare, Ralph Berry made the observation that: we have had to wait until the twentieth century to receive any of the possibilities of The Tempest (33).2 Berrys book is a series of interviews with modern directors of Shakespeare. His observation suggests that the power of the twentieth-century director over both actor and author in Vsevolod Meyerholds Theater-Triangle is the principal reason for The Tempests contemporary directors belief in their ability to nally realize the plays possibilities.3 Twentieth-century advances in theatrical technology have further contributed to this sense that, more than any other play in the Shakespeare canon, The Tempest is the directors play. Drama critic Michael Billington has voiced his agreement with Berrys thesis, calling The Tempest every directors dream play: . . . being the story of a master magician who has all the elements in his power (In Britain, a Proliferation of Prosperos, 5). The Tempest is often sentimentally perceived as Shakespeares farewell to the stage, and many productions of the play resonate with a metatheatricality that emphasizes its reference
1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST
13
to the great globe itself. Indeed, The Tempest can so fuse the directors role with that of Prospero, that, as in Yukio Ninagawas production of 1988, the director physically becomes Prospero, the plays onstage director. Yet the spectacle elements of The Tempest had attracted directors to the play and connected them to Shakespeares onstage magician long before the days of the auteur/director. With the introduction of the stage machinery which made it possible to stage Shakespeares spectacular images and effects, great change occurred in the performance history of The Tempest. Thus, this concept of the stage directors power as analogous to that of Prospero had its origins in the directorial contributions of such iconic gures as David Garrick, Charles Kean, and Max Reinhardt. Ever since its revival upon the Restoration stage, The Tempest has been the subject (and often the victim) of directorial invention and intervention. Prior to 1650, performances of The Tempest are cited far less frequently than are any other of Shakespeares best-known works. There is documentary evidence that The Tempest was acted before the Royal Court at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and that it was probably a part of the festivities celebrating the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I, to the elector palatine during the winter of 161213. It was almost certainly performed at the Kings Mens indoor theater, the Blackfriars, but no evidence indicates that it was ever staged at the Globe Theatre. (Although Stephen Orgel argues that: there is no reason why it could not have been [Tempest, 64]). These early performances of The Tempest were upon the spare, uncluttered Jacobean stage, with minimal use of stage machinery. After the Restoration, in November of 1667, William Davenant and John Dryden adapted Shakespeares Tempest. Music and grand stage effects were emphasized, and Shakespeares language was radically abridged. Sebastian was eliminated from the plot, and Prosperos role was radically reduced. Both Miranda and Caliban were given sistersDorinda and Sycorax, respectively. As a parallel to Miranda, the young woman who had never seen a man, Davenant created Hippolito, (infant son to the dying Duke of Mantua, and left in the care of Prospero), a young man never to have set eyes upon woman. In this adaptation, Prosperos sorcery revealed that should Hippolito set his eyes upon a woman, it would cause his death. Inexplicably, this was used as a
14
comic plot device. Prospero preserved Hippolitos life by keeping him hidden from his own two daughters, but this preservation from death also resulted in Hippolitos deprivation from life.4 From its rst arrival upon the stage in 1667, the Dryden-Davenant adaptation was a popular success. The noted diarist and theater attendee, Samuel Pepys, records his return to the performance ve times in the rst four months of its original staging (Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeares Caliban, 174). In 1674, Shakespeares Tempest was further altered with the addition of Thomas Shadwells musical revisions. The Tempest then became an opera with elaborate scenic machinery. In 1690, Henry Purcell added a new aria for Dorinda. Hippolito, by this time, had become a standard Restoration breeches role for the female actors of the period. This gender switch further emphasized the sexual ambiguity and tension of the manufactured love plots of these adaptations. Through the 1730s these musical adaptations of The Tempest were the only stagings of the play which London audiences saw. The Tempest opera was an audience favorite, and held sway until David Garrick was well into his career as actor/manager of the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1757, Garrick starred as Prospero in a production that more closely resembled Shakespeares version of The Tempest. Yet Garrick cut over four hundred lines, mostly from act 2, scene 1, the rst scene with the exiles from Milan and Naples upon Prosperos island. Despite these deletions, for the rst time in over one hundred years, Shakespeares text was dramatized upon the London stage. For the next hundred years, an uneasy peace reigned over the stage history of The Tempest. Both the elaborate opera version of the play, with extensive stage machinery, and productions, that emphasized Shakespeares text were produced. In 1789, Drury Lane staged John Philip Kembles production of The Tempest. Dorinda and Hippolita were back. Apparently, what contributed to the revival of these opera versions was the fact that the leading Georgian actresses of the timeElizabeth Farren, Mary Logan Gibbs, and Dorothy Jordanpreferred the role of Dorinda to that of Miranda (Grice, The Tempest: Stage History, 859). By the early nineteenth century, actors of the stature of Kemble and Charles Macready were playing Prospero, and Shakespeares Tempest gradually reemerged. Although spectacular
15
scenic effects remained a part of any production, the performing version (was) rmly Shakespeares (Orgel, Tempest, 69). In 1857, the eras penchant for historical accuracy was exemplied in Charles Keans staging of The Tempest. Grice describes the production as a scenically superb representation of the original (The Tempest: Stage History, 859). Yet Lewis Carrolls account of what he saw in the theater hardly reads like a description of what Shakespeare had envisioned for the Kings Mens production at the Blackfriars. In his diaries, Carroll wrote:
The scenic effects in The Tempest . . . surpass anything I ever saw . . . The most marvelous was the shipwreck in the rst scene, where, (to all appearance), a real ship is heaving about on huge waves, and is nally wrecked under a cliff that reaches up to the roof . . . but this, and every other one in my recollection . . . were all outdone by the concluding scene, where Ariel is left alone, hovering over the wide ocean, watching the retreating ship. It is an innovation on Shakespeare, but a worthy one, and the conception of a true poet. (reprinted in Salgado, Eyewitness, 34950)
This Kean production of the play may well serve as template for The Tempest as example of directors theater. Within the context of this study, I am dening directors theater as productions where the staging of Shakespeares creation is ltered through the vision of one man, the theatrical director, and where there appears to be a blurring between the role of Prospero and the responsibilities of the director. Historic accuracy and spectacular stage effects continued to dominate English productions of The Tempest until the last decade of the nineteenth century. The William Poel 1897 staging for the Elizabethan Stage Society pushed The Tempest in performance back toward its Jacobean origins. Poel reasoned that if the staging of Shakespeare was to be as historically accurate as possible, the production must create circumstances like those of Shakespeares acting company, and employ the dramatic and staging conventions of the seventeenth century. Poel urged the use of facsimiles of quarto and folio texts as rehearsal scripts. His company of amateur actors performed in Elizabethan costumes and used no scenery, playing on a bare stage, furnished with only a table and chair (cited in Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 267).
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Poel was dismissed as idiosyncratic, and his stagings were often derided for their amateurishness. Apparently, his actors were awkward with seventeenth-century conventions, making what was supposed to appear onstage as natural, seem exotic. Yet, for all that, Poels work led to a change in the way Shakespeare was to be staged over the next hundred years. What followed after Poel were stagings that unburdened the stage of Victorian clutter and moved performance back in the direction of an open, empty playing space; work best exemplied by the Shakespeare productions of Harley Granville-Barker and Jacques Copeau. What also followed after Poel was a century of productions of The Tempest that emphasized the individual vision of the person directing the staging. One such landmark production was Max Reinhardts Germanlanguage staging of 1915. Reinhardt used elaborate machinery, but not in the tradition of Victorian excess. Here, the stage design was in the service of the creation of a modern Shakespeare performance vocabulary. Reinhardts Tempest was mounted upon the large stage of Berlins Volksbu hne Theatre, on a revolving drum. This revolving stage could also be raised and lowered, be` coming the focus of Reinhardts mise en scene. When the drum disappeared below, it created a sixty-foot subterranean playing space for the opening storm scene. Upon Gonzalos line: Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, the ship disappeared behind a fog curtain, and Prosperos island began its ascent. A unied playing space was formed. Reinhardt thus created a venue for his tempest that could exist in harmony with the island of barren ground. With this Reinhardt production, the twentieth-century director reached out to Shakespeares play. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that from this production onward, the twentiethcentury director reached out with Shakespeares play. In a 1948 article entitled Style in Shakespeare Production, Peter Brook, then twenty-three years old, wrote:
However hard a producer or designer may strive to mount a classic with complete objectivity, he can never avoid reecting a second periodthe one in which he works and lives.
This suggestion that an historical period can place its imprint upon productions of Shakespeare is largely a twentieth-century
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notion. It is an argument that has been challenged by postmodernists who see such narrativizing as reinforcing the hegemony of the cause-and-effect paradigm (Ingram, What Kind of Future, 218). In his article The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, Craig Owens compares the period in which The Tempest was written, and the forty-two years which cover the period from the rst of my Tempest productions (1948) to the last (1990). Owens argues that during the postWorld War II era, European civilization was nally forced into recognition of different cultures through means other than the trinity of usurpation, domination, and subjugation. These are the methods by which Western culture has exercised its inuence over the rest of the world since the time that The Tempest was enacted (57)and which Shakesperes tale of Prospero, Antonio, Sebastian, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban dramatizes. Thus, my study of productions of The Tempest deals with a play which was not only written at the time when Europe was heartily and mightily exerting its inuence over other cultures, but concerns a play about the very exertion of that pressure, produced during that period in history when that inuence was nally beginning to decline. Indeed, the Prospero-Caliban struggle for the integrity of the island has been used as dramatic metaphor for the colonialist/enslavement argument in such signicant studies of the effects of colonialism as Une tempete: Adaptation de La ` Tempe te de Shakespeare pour une the a tre ne gre by the Marti niquean playwright Aime Ce saire, Signifying Nothing: Truths True Contents in Shakespeares Texts by Malcolm Evans, and the essay Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in our America by the Cuban poet and scholar, Roberto Fernandez Retamar. In his work, Evans writes, The Tempest . . . can still endorse one of the most fundamental tenets of colonialism and fascism (73), while Retamar places his argument even more succinctly:
This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same languagetoday he has no otherto curse him, to wish that the red plague would fall on him? (Signifying Nothing, 14)
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The directorial approach to the Caliban/Prospero relationship then becomes perhaps the most vital of all signiers in postcolonial productions of the play, and is certainly The Tempests most delicate and politically sensitive contemporary issue. It will be a matter I will be discussing in greater detail, particularly in the chapters on Brooks 1968 and 1990 productions and Strehlers 1978 staging. I will also look at the issue of the Caliban/Prospero relationship in my closing chapter.
In 1948, Italy was just beginning its emergence from the destruction and political chaos of its World War II involvement. In June of that year, Giorgio Strehler mounted his rst production of The Tempest. This outdoor staging employed the lake in the Boboli Gardens in Florence that had at its center a fountain honoring the Roman god Neptune. Strehler had an amphitheater constructed around the lake that became the playing area for the production. Various site-specic locations around this amphitheater/island became Prosperos cell or Calibans grotto. The physical staging and design of the production brought to mind an eclectic and disparate clash of periods and referencessculpture from the Classical world, the chivalric poetry of the Renaissance, the mansion-style staging of medieval theater, and the music of the baroque. Emphasis was placed upon the musical and scenic features of the celebratory masque. Singers costumed as if for baroque opera performed the goddess roles. The music, arranged themes by Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti, underlined the rediscovery of human values, the journey to a new world, a voyage into the future (Gaipa, La Tempesta 1948 a Boboli). Was this production, then, with its classical sculpture and music, and its climactic reworks display a redemptive fairy tale, a voyage to a future which implored Italy to move forward from the Fascist horrors of its recent past? A decade later, Peter Brook directed a gray and somber staging of The Tempest, set upon an island of chilly unease. This production featured Sir John Gielgud as Prospero (described by one critic as a beardless, embittered neurotic painfully coming to terms with his own vindictiveness, and by another as a hardbitten man with a large chip on his shoulder). Was a specter of
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nuclear holocaust reected in Gielguds portrayal of Prospero? Was this 1957 Tempest a cold-war reection upon the Hungarian Revolution? In the aftermath of the concurrent crisis in Suez, was the production a wistful consideration of Britains last gasp of colonial glory? John Osbornes angry young man dramaturgy had emerged in London in 1956; was this Tempest a reection of the same disillusionment that generated Look Back in Anger? The year 1956 also brought Bertolt Brechts Berliner Ensemble to London for their rst visit. What effect, if any, did this seminal theatrical event have upon Brooks staging of The Tempest? In 1968 Brook directed an international company in a deconstruction of The Tempest. The production, billed as an exercise, was originally to be performed in Paris at the Theatre of Nations Festival. It had to be moved to the Roundhouse, a theater in the Camden section of London, when the French student riots of May 1968 forced the closing of the festival. This production included an audience participation masque scene framed as a sixties Happening, and made extensive use of Grotowski and Artaudbased mirroring exercises and improvisations. Could this experimental Tempest be considered a lightning rod that absorbed and reected the theatrical, political, and social turmoil of its era? In 1978, Giorgio Strehler restaged The Tempest, thirty years after his original production. Although now eliminating the masque scene entirely, Strehler continued his metatheatrical reading of the play. The production depicted Ariel as a Pierrot prototype and returned Trinculo and Stephano to their commedia dellarte origins. This mature Strehler production included homages to Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht, Luigi Pirandello, and, inasmuch as Strehler believed there were strong parallels between himself and Prospero, perhaps even to himself. This production could likely be termed the metatheatrical/eclectic Tempest. In cultural adaptation of Shakespeare, geographic and historic accuracy is often de-emphasized. Telling the story coherently and relating themes clearly become more signicant factors in the shaping of such productions than are meticulous considerations of Shakespeares language, a Shakespearean acting style, or issues of locating the play in the playwrights prescribed time and place. Throughout the performance history of Shakespeare, adaptation has been the simplest and clearest means by which non-
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English-speaking audiences have received and comprehended his plays. The effort involved in making the themes from Shakespeare accessible in cultural adaptation allows for more artistic freedom and invention than those within traditional AngloAmerican Shakespeare performance history. Such productions, often using modern, vernacular translations, are less likely to attempt to reimagine what a performance of the play would have been like in seventeenth-century England, and are more likely to use whatever means might assist in communicating the directors vision of The Tempest to his audience. The directors vision becomes central to the theatrical production in such cultural adaptationswhat Gerald Rabkin describes as the attempt to elevate scenic and performance elements to equal importance with the text (Olympic Arts Festival, 45). For the productions of The Tempest in the 1980s and 90s, in the post-Mahabharata theatrical universe, it seemed timely and appropriate to investigate examples of such cultural adaptation. One such production was the 1988 Yukio Ninagawa No Tem pest subtitled: A Rehearsal of a No play on the island of Sado, which employed medieval Japanese theater tradition while including lavish, modern visual effects. Did Ninagawas Tempest emblemize, subvert, or contribute to a postcolonial, non-Western approach to staging Shakespeare? In 1990, soon after the acclaim accorded The Mahabharata, and amid the resultant controversy over cultural appropriation which accompanied its success, Peter Brook staged his third production of The Tempest. For this production, Brook cast black Africans in the roles of Prospero and Ariel, a young German as Caliban, and two young Asian women alternating in the role of Miranda. Perhaps this production should be considered the intercultural Tempest. This study will attempt to provide an account of these productions from their germination and place these stagings within the context of cultural adaptation/appropriation. There has been more scholarly analysis in England and the United States of non-English-language productions of Shakespeare in recent years, yet there is still a curious avoidance of international Shakespeare in performance histories of Shakespeares plays. Surveys of Shakespeare in performance, written as part of the new Arden Shakespeare (3rd edition) for example, have continued to detail productions of Shakespeares plays with
21
an alarmingly limited scope. The new Arden Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, continues this shortsighted approach, ignoring all non-Anglo-American performances. In view of the Vaughans past scholarship, these omissions are particularly startling. Such myopia has kept far too many reconstructionists, archeologists, and theater historians from concerning themselves with productions not performed upon the English-speaking stage.5 At the rapid-re rate at which Shakespeare is being adapted and performed throughout the world, a look at the performance history of any play in the canon demands serious consideration of international Shakespeare. The last three Tempest in this studyStrehlers 1978, Ninagawas 1988, and Brooks 1990 productions are hugely signicant examples of the internationalization of the Shakespeare canon. These Italian-, Japanese-, and French-language productions, unable to emphasize Shakespeares language, instead stress Shakespeares stagecraft. Strehler employed commedia dellarte as a vital element in his staging, bringing back to Italy the action as well as something of the theatrical style of this drama of Milanese and Neapolitan treachery, sorcery, and trickery. Ninagawa paralleled the banishment of one of the founders of No drama, Zeami, with that of Prospero, to incorporate native Japanese theater tradition with Jacobean stagecraft. The masque scene, particularly demonstrated the fusion of Eastern and Western performance histories. Brook turned The Tempest into an intercultural folktale with Asian music, black African usurpers and magicians, and a white dwarf/child Caliban to subvert any modernist colonial subtext. It is these combinations of technical wizardry, bravado, and vision that mark the strategy of the twentieth-century director as he approaches The Tempest. It is what has made him Prosperos true preserver.
2
Giorgio Strehler: The Tempest, 1948
The directors fearsome responsibility is not limited, as one might think, to functioning as a referee. A director must create internal, thoughtfully assimilated discipline . . . a mentality, a style. An unmistakable style. Giorgio Strehler, Responsibilities of Directing
THE YEAR 1611 MARKED THE CONVERGENCE OF TWO GREAT THEATRIcal traditions. In that year William Shakespeares play, The Tempest, about the banished Duke of Milan was rst staged. It was also the year of the publication in Venice of Flaminio Scalas Il teatro delle Favole rappresentative, the rst collection of Italian commedia dellarte scenarios, gathering the structural elements of commedia and introducing them to an erudite reading public (Richards and Richards, Commedia dellarte, 145). The Tempest was the last independently created work in Shakespeares stage history. The free-form improvisatory performance style of commedia dellarte and the staging of Shakespeare were both to have enormous inuence upon Western theater over the next four hundred years. Commedia dellarte and Shakespeare were successfully amalgamated in the productions of Giorgio Strehler, especially in his stagings of The Tempest in 1948 and 1978. However, Italys theatrical traditions required a four-hundred-year gestation period before the union of seventeenth-century English theater and the commedia dellarte was nally achieved. Ironically, in order to blend the spontaneity of commedia dellarte with the text and structure of Shakespeares stage, an autocratic, single-minded theatrical director like Giorgio Strehler was required. From their beginnings in the mid-sixteenth century, the rival Italian theatrical traditons, commedia erudita and commedia dellarte, had different structures and rules. Commedia erudita had 22
2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948
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its origins in the scripted plays and learned dramas of the Italian Renaissance. The classical pastorals, tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies of Ariosto, Cinthio, Guarini, and Tasso were the inspiration for these plays. Mainly written to be read, not performed, many of these works were translated from Latin into Italian in the late fteenth century. Shortly thereafter, commedia erudita began to be written in Italian. When these works were performed, it was with elaborate scenery and costumes for the entertainment of the dilettanti in aristocratic courts and academies. Commedia erudita remained the sanctuary of the Italian cultured elite, even and despite their performances by professional commedia dellarte companies. By contrast, the original theatrical works of the commedia dellarte companies were unscripted. These performances were held in town squares, street markets, hired rooms, gardens, and courtyards, as well as in the great halls and formal salons of the nobility. As a result, commedia dellarte acquired a reputation for spontaneity and theatricality. It was this convention of an undisciplined actors street theater run by its performersthe main tradition of the commedia dellartewhich Giorgio Strehler confronted and disciplined in order to achieve success in staging Shakespeare for a twentieth-century Italian audience. It was Strehlers further goal to create an audience in Italy for the theater of Shakespeare, Goldoni, and Brecht within a segment of the populace that believed itself to be largely excluded from scripted, dramatic performance. In a spring 1964 article in the Tulane Drama Review entitled Sixteen Years of The Piccolo Teatro, the founding fathers of that company, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler, wrote of the philosophy upon which the Piccolo was based. This article described a cultural polarization within the arts that has existed in Italy, at least since the sixteenth century:
There are insuperable obstacles to the diffusion of culture, to the diffusion of theatre . . . Every great modern theatre is linked to a nation. England had Shakespeare because it was already England. In Italy there has been nothing since the Renaissance. The Renaissance is crucial; immediately after it there was a double cleavage, between men of letters and men of science, and between culture and the people . . . Moreover, our common speech and educated language are so radically different that one can say that the Italian thinks as he does not speak and speaks as he does not write. (28)
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In Italy the distinction between theater as culture, and theater as entertainment has been clearly delineated. This split in Italys life of the theater was affected by such variables as class, education, language, and dialect; issues which were considerably inamed as a result of Italys volatile political, social, and economic climate in the 1930s and 40s. Theatrically and politically idealistic young men founded the Piccolo Theatre in 1947. As a result, much of the writing, both by and about the early years of the Piccolo Theatre, is lled with such buzzwords of the social movements of the 1930s as bourgeois structures, the masses, and fascist obscurantism. In a 1962 article for World Theatre, Paolo Grassi remembered the role of theater in Italy in the immediate postwar period:
The old structures . . . had remained almost intact; at the helm, private enterprise continued to see the theatre as a mainly commercial undertaking intended to satisfy, not a thirst for culture, but the need for entertainment and escape peculiar to the bourgeois public. The masses, through lack of any natural interest in this type of drama and, above all, for nancial reasons, were completely missing from the life of the theatre. (Milan Piccolo Teatro, 167).
Grassi maintained that the Piccolo Theatre was founded because of a desire to put forward theoretical principles and practical standards of conduct radically different from those which up until then had governed theatrical activity in Italy (Milan Piccolo Teatro, 167). Both Strehler and Grassi asserted that, in addition to its manifold totalitarian sins, Fascism had been responsible for the toleration and perpetuation of the worst excesses of histrionic acting. Whether Mussolini can be held accountable for bad theater is arguable; the decadent acting style of the mattatore had dominated the Italian theater since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Theatrical troupes, as in much of Europe, England, and the United States, revolved around the person of the leading actor (the mattatore). Mattatore performance consisted of acting without any directorial control, mainly because most of these performers served as their own directors. The hierarchic relation between playwright and performer was subverted, and the text pulverized, under the pretext of displaying the undoubted excellence of the leading man (Camilleri, Trend toward Permanent Companies, 158). In the words of
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Strehler and Grassi: . . . there were no directors. Phony stars and fake prima donnas reigned, and the arbiter of plays was the bourgeois public (Sixteen Years, 32). Strehlers method of direction, which he was to nurture, develop, and rene over his fty-year career, countered this heritage. The chief components of Strehlers process were bulldog tenacity, a massive ego which resulted in utter certainty about his own instincts, great intellectual powers, extensive research, and an incontrovertible sense of the rewards to be acquired from an eclectic admixture of theatrical styles. Giorgio Strehler was born on 14 August 1921 in Trieste, Italy. His father, Bruno Strehler, was a European rowing champion. His mother, Alberta Lovric, was a concert violinist who performed under the stage name of Albertina Ferrari. Strehlers father died of typhus when Giorgio was three, and he lived for the next four years in Trieste with his mother and maternal grandfather. This grandfather, Olimpio Lovric, directed the opera and also ran several cinemas. Lovric died in 1928, at which time Giorgio and his mother moved to Milan, to live with his French grandmother, who had separated from her husband, Lovric. As a sevenyear-old, Giorgio began studying the piano. Before settling upon a career in theater, Strehler rst gave serious consideration to becoming a musical conductor, and music remained of fundamental importance to him. Strehler became stagestruck at the age of fteen, after watching a company from Venice perform Goldoni plays. Two years later, in 1937, he auditioned for admission to Milans best-known drama school, the Accademia dei Filodrammatici, with the ambition of becoming an actor. The choice of becoming an actor rather than a director was determined by the times. Italians didnt even want to discuss the possibility of a director, Strehler explained (Grassi and Strehler, Sixteen Years, 33), again indicating the dominance of the mattatore tradition. Strehler later measured Italys importance as a source for acting talent against its legacy of dramatic literature:
The Italian theatre has produced few important dramatic authors Machiavelli, Goldoni, Pirandellobut an enormous number of actors. Between 1500 and 1700, every self-respecting court in Europe had to have a company of Italian actors, but though they were much admired, they were socially untouchable . . . These companies became
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separate communities; their members married within the tribe, dynasties were created, and the actors transmitted their art from generation to generation. The children played childrens roles, then grew into young lovers, then leads, then old characterists. Vestiges of this system still existed when I began to act. (Quoted by Sachs in Proles: Giorgio Strehler, 46)
A change began to occur within the communities of Italian actors as Strehler began his theatrical apprenticeship in the late 1930s, and the ensuing schism helped to bring about an end to the age of the mattatore. Strehler and his young contemporaries were interested in Stanislavskys effect upon the theatrical world; the old guard looked askance at the discussion of new forms within their dramatic universe. As a means of distancing himself from the Milanese theatrical establishment, Strehler began writing theater criticism, which brought him to the attention of Paolo Grassi, director of an experimental theater company, Gruppo Palcoscenico. In January 1943, while on leave from the army, Strehler began his directorial career by directing three Pirandello one-act plays for the Gruppo Palcoscenico. During World War II Strehler was militantly anti-Fascist. Although drafted into Mussolinis army, he was part of an anti-Fascist cell, and, by 1944, had been sentenced to death on two different occasions by the German occupation forces. Resistance forces smuggled Strehler into Switzerland. While there, Strehler formed an all-male theater company consisting of his cell-mates of exiled young socialists. He directed a production of T. S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral:
I staged this play without knowing what I was doing. The production was reduced to bare essentials . . . we did the kind of avant-garde things that kids do . . . inspired by the theories of Alexander Tairov . . . Murder in the Cathedral was a great success. And for the rst timebecause I had seen some resultsI got the idea that maybe I was destined to be a director and that I was made to help others perform. (quoted in Sachs, Proles: Giorgio Strehler, 50).
This production of Murder in the Cathedral was soon followed by another success, this time Albert Camuss Caligula. Strehler was taking advantage of his wartime captivity to start a career as a director, and he began formulating his innovative method of di-
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rection. Strehler saw the worlds of the mattatori and the Futurists, who had so profoundly affected Italian theater before World War I, as equally unsatisfactory theatrical alternatives. One resulted in star turns by uncontrolled leading actors, and the other, to Strehlers mind, indulged itself with random experimentation for its own sake. As Strehler wrote in his essay Responsibilities of Directing, published in the 10 November 1942 issue of Posizione, the Gruppo Palcoscenicos journal, the only remedy was the rm hand of a despotically aware . . . acutely sensitive visionary. When Strehler began his career as a professional stage director in the middle of the 1940s, Italy was reeling from the disastrous impact of World War II, and Italian theater was reacting against the period of the star actor. As a result, Italy was quite slow to be introduced to the concept of director as a scenic writer. Indeed, Italy was quite slow to accept the concept of, and the necessity for the stage director, regardless of what form that direction might take (Grassi and Strehler, Sixteen Years, 33). The tradition of the star actor lasted longer in Italy than elsewhere in Europe and America. Strehler maintained that only in 1922 did our rst director appearVirgileo Talli . . . the rst man to step down from the stage and direct his actors from the oor of the theatre (Grassi and Strehler, Sixteen Years, 32). Talli was also credited with introducing the public playhouses to such native Italian playwrights as Luigi Pirandello, Piermaria Rosso di San Secondo, Luigi Antonelli, and Luigi Chiarelli. Of all theatrical movements to affect the arrival of the stage director as a vital entity in Italian theater, it was the Futurists who brought a new emphasis to the role of coordinator within the theatrical process. Under the leadership of Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, the Futurists adopted a manifesto (constructed in the period from 1911 to 1913, largely from the writings of Marinetti and Brahilla Pratella), calling for the incorporation of a mixture of mediathe visual arts collage, the variety theaters vaudeville entertainment, and elements of early cinema, such as acrobatics, song and dance, clowning, and elimination of coherent story linein an effort to develop creator-centered theater pieces. The Futurists were determined to free the audience from their roles as what Marinetti referred to as stupid voyeurs. By doing so, the Futurists laid the groundwork for the theatricality and metatheatricality of Bertolt Brecht and Giorgio Strehler, who were
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also to demand that their audiences become more active participants in the theatrical performance. Another signicant early-twentieth-century Italian director, Anton Giulio Bragaglia (18941960), staged Bertolt Brechts Threepenny Opera in Rome in 1929, only one year after its Berlin premiere. Bragaglia was an important creative force in the early development of the eclectic Italian stage director. At his Theatre of the Independence, Bragaglia introduced Italy to the works of Strindberg, Schnitzler, Jarry, Maeterlinck, and Apollinaire, attempting to bring Italian theater into the orbit of the Independent Theatre Movement which had swept Northern Europe and England nearly fty years earlier. Bragaglias efforts provided some of the cultural groundwork for the emergence of Strehlers Piccolo Theatre. In 1945, with the war over, Strehler returned to Milan. In September 1945, the actress Diana Torrieri approached Strehler, asking him to direct her in a production of Eugene ONeills Mourning Becomes Electra. Ordered to cut the play down to a running time of three-and-a-half hours, Strehler was successful. Working steadily throughout 1945 and 1946, Strehler directed ten productions. Young, idealistic, and trained in the school of Marxist dialectic, Strehler saw theater as a means of bringing hope and change to a ravaged Italian society. Italian theater was indeed in crisis, its theatrical landscape dismal. Many of Italys physical theater spaces had been destroyed in the war. There were few opportunities for actors, and a very limited repertory. In 1947, Strehler and Grassi formed the Piccolo Theatre, a permanent repertory theater, with Strehler as its chief director. In addition to offering promise to a desolate country, the Piccolo Theatre had as its mission to introduce a teatro stabilea permanent theater company in a country where such institutions were unknown. True to their socialist principles, Strehler and Grassi intended their company to become a peoples theatre. The audience of the Piccolo Theatre was to be drawn from a cross-section of Milanese society, including the workers and students. The Piccolo Theatre attempted to involve all of Milan in their theater through various means. They presented low-cost season-ticket arrangements, a repertory that would appeal to a mass audience by presenting works which mirrored contemporary concerns, and they made great efforts to dispel the notion that theater was a closed, elite circle (Cairns, Italy, 111). True to its statement of
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principles, the Piccolo Theatre became recognized as Italys rst public art theater after completing its rst two eclectic and highly successful seasons. These seasons included Gorkis The Lower Depths; Armand Salacrous Nights of Wrath, a play about the French Resistance; Calderons Spanish seventeenth-century mystery play The Prodigious Sorcerer; and Goldonis The Servant of Two Masters. Strehlers rst attempt at staging Shakespeare was a production of Richard II that was performed at the Piccolo Theatre in April 1948, just two months before his Florentine production of The Tempest. Richard II was praised as a lyrical testimony to human fragility (Lombardo, Strehler e Shakespeare, 13). It was performed on a semihexagonal, xed stage, with an upper and lower playing area. The physical staging simulated an Elizabethan theater, while at the same time the production indicated that the texts transference of the monarchy from Richard II to Henry IV was related to Italys own recent passage of authority, in which power had been turned over to the Christian Democrats (ibid., 13). Richard II was almost unanimously praisedthe production helping to create public acceptance for ensemble acting and an end to the reign of the mattatori. Richard IIs success led Strehler to continue to combine historic research with a sense of contemporaneity in other Shakespeare productions. In his subsequent production of The Tempest, Strehler determined to limit theatricality, while emphasizing the fusion of the magical and fantastic elements of Shakespeares text with the natural beauty of the surroundings of his outdoor site. The history of Shakespeare performance in Italy reveals a slow and painstaking process toward acceptance, approval, and, ultimately, experimentation. His greatness as a literary gure was rmly established in Italy by the 1830s, but Shakespeares plays were not performed widely. French dramatic theory, most particularly the neoclassicism of Voltaire and his disciples, inuenced mid-nineteenth-century Italian intelligentsia, and as a result, Shakespeare was looked upon with a large measure of disapproval. One acolyte of Voltaire, Francesco Saverio Quadrio, is cited in Agostino Lombardos Shakespeare and Italian Criticism as parroting Voltaires censure of Shakespeares dismissal of the dramatic unities. Lombardo writes:
. . . in his Della Storia e della Ragione dogni Poesia (1743), [Quadri] literally repeats the major passages of Voltaire, dening Shakespeare
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as a poet gifted with a genius . . . full of fecundity and strength but with no knowledge of the just rules. (534))
As a result of such criticism, Shakespeare as dramatic, nonmusical theater was slow to nd its way into the Italian cultural consciousness. The opera and the ballet became the theatrical forms whereby Italy rst absorbed and accepted Shakespeare upon the stage. The rst performances of Shakespeares drama in Italy were French language productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in 1774 and 1778. The rst Italian-language staging of Shakespeare in Italy was a production of Hamlet, performed in Florence between 1791 and 1793. The Age of Romanticism and Italys nationalistic Risorgimento movement of the 1820s and 30s contributed to the creation of a popular audience for Shakespeare. Political gures like Giuseppi Manzini and the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi saw Shakespeare as someone who shared their passion for freedom. In 1836, ` in his essay Della Fatalita considerata come elemento drammatico, Manzini wrote:
In Shakespeare . . . liberty lives: a day perhaps, an hour, has subdued a life to necessity, but in that day, in that hour, the man was free and the arbiter of his future . . . In the doctrine that emerges from the plays of Shakespeare, the creature is responsible for his own actions. (quoted in Lombardo, Shakespeare and Italian Criticism, 562)
The nationalistic spirit and kinship that the Italian patriot identied in Shakespeare found its voice in Verdis adaptations of Shakespeare into his operas Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff. This infusion of the spirit of Political Shakespeare also spurred a renewed interest in the performance of the plays upon the dramatic, nonoperatic stage. The Italian dramatic theater audience, however, showed little tolerance for Shakespeares nonconformity to the unities and to the classical views of decorum. This parochial attitude was most evident in the audiences reaction to Gustav Modenas production of Othello in Milan in 1842. Modena was considered signicant as the rst Italian actor/director; he also performed the role of Othello in this production. Modena eschewed neoclassical ideals, substituting instead, in his production of Othello a Venetian setting reminiscent of a commedia dellarte performance. When Bra-
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bantio appeared in disordered nightclothes in the rst scene, the audience booed, hissed, and forced the curtain to be dropped (Italy, in The Readers Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, 39091). From 1850 on, Shakespeare as drama began to be more widely performed in Italy. Notable Italian actors like Ernesto Rossi, Tommaso Salvini, Adelaide Ristori, Ermete Novelli, and eventually Eleonora Duse became celebrated for their performances of Shakespeare. Rossi and Salvini were actually students of Gustav Modena. Unfortunately, the other result of the success of these Italian Shakespeareans was the perpetuation of the age of the mattatore. Tommaso Salvini acted in and directed a celebrated production of Othello that was continually performed for forty years. In 1895, this production toured to Moscow, where it was viewed and admired by Stanislavsky, who wrote in My Life in Art:
Salvini molded with such clearness, with such merciless logic and such irresistible persuasiveness that the spectator saw all the detailed curves of the suffering soul of Othello and sympathized with him from the depth of the heart. (270)
Stanislavsky was most affected by Salvinis interpretation of Othello, particularly by Salvinis scholarly approach. Ultimately, Stanislavsky incorporated Salvinis nightly practice of meditation and transformation into the character of Othello as an important foundation element of his own acting theory. Thus, by the intriguing transmogrication process by which theater practice has always been transported internationally, Salvinis efforts reached Russia, where Stanislavsky passed his theories and practice along to practitioners like Alexander Tairov, Pietro Sharoff, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, who then demonstrated them for Bertolt Brecht and, ultimately, Giorgio Strehler, who eventually returned them to Italy. The Italian Shakespeare repertory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century remained limited. In his 1916 study, Shakespeare in Italy, Lacy Collison-Morley maintained that Italians considered Shakespeare primarily as a writer of tragedy. While efforts were made to perform Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth on the Italian stage, the combination of Roman settings and concerns for matters of love, greed, ambition, and jealousy made Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and especially
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Othello Shakespeares most popular stage plays in Italy. The Merchant of Venice, the comedy with tragic overtones set in a magical Italian city, was also popular. The growth of touring companies from around the globe, the ourishing of independent theater groups throughout Europe, and the emergence of signicant, non-English directors of Shakespeare whose work began to be seen, adapted, and emulated elsewhere, is what brought about the most signicant change in the Italian approach to Shakespeare production. Directors like the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, Andre Antoine, Max Reinhardt, and Jacques Copeau created signicant Shakespeare productions in the period between 1870 and 1930. This work eventually found its way to Italy and affected the Italian Shakespeare repertory. Productions of Shakespeare in Italy in the 1930s by three signicant nonnative directors had a major impact upon Giorgio Strehlers earliest work with Shakespeare. These three directorsMax Reinhardt, a German, Jacques Copeau, a Frenchman, and Pietro Sharoff, a Russian who emigrated to Italy in 1933all staged notable outdoor productions of Shakespeare. Pietro Sharoff trained at the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Vakhtangov. In 1935 he directed a production of Othello in the courtyard of the Doges Palace in Venice. The production included elements that Stanislavsky had planned for the Moscow Art Theatre production of Othello, but which had never been performed. In Sharoffs production, the courtyard of the Doges Palace overlooked a lagoon that thus served for both the arrival of Othellos ship at Cyprus, and for Iago and Cassios entrance via gondola. Of even greater signicance to Strehler were Max Reinhardts productions of A Midsummer Nights Dream in the Boboli Gardens in the summer of 1933, and The Merchant of Venice, performed in Venice in 1934. Reinhardts Midsummer Nights Dream was looked upon as a turning point in Italian Shakespeare performance history. Critics and scholars have waxed poetic over the productions impact. Ermano Contini wrote that Reinhardt: magically transformed the Boboli Gardens into a fabulous forest echoing with sighs and songs, peopled with sprites and fairies, shot with color and light and ame, and blazing at the end, for the sumptuous triumph of the nuptial celebrations (Sense of Grandeur, 49). Silvio DAmico wrote:
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It was, in a very literal sense, out of the landscape, transformed into a dream scene, that the brave gentlemen and fair, love-smitten ladies were born. Along the parterres fairies ed, scarcely setting foot to ground, dressed in fragments of the sky, while puckish sprites frolicked in the shrubbery, on the steps and high up in the branches of the trees. (Theatre in the Open Air, 30)
The production juxtaposed music with dance, pageantry with drama, and used the site and the audience as vital components within the performance. In 1934, Reinhardt used Venice as the backdrop for a site-specic production of The Merchant of Venice, exploiting the citys bridges, canals, gondolas, and the Jewish ghetto itself as key ele` ments in the mise en scene. Thus, after Jessica eloped with Lorenzo, Shylock returned to his home, located on the bank of a canal, and found it empty. Renato Simoni recounts how through the windows we could see him dashing from one room to another, and hear his anguished sobs of rage (Il Mercante di Venezia). Several critics and theater historians saw a signicant link between these works of Reinhardt and those of Strehler, who readily acknowledged this debt. He described his childhood memory of watching Reinhardt conducting rehearsals in Venice. Strehler remembered Reinhardt throwing his arms wide, laughing and crying at the same time, a man possessed:
. . . I heard music . . . and I saw people moving around, costumes that seemed marvelous to me, gondolas in motion, and a little man dressed all in white . . . He was very agitated . . . he would stand up, go over to one of the actors, say something I couldnt make out . . . and go back to his seat. He may not have been angryhe may have only been giving the instructions that directors givebut to me he seemed angry as hell . . . I asked, Mama, why is that man so angry And she said, Hes angry because the others arent doing things as he says. Theyre doing things differently, and he doesnt agree with them. You see? A man was getting angry as hell because people werent doing things the way he wanted. (quoted in Sachs, Proles: Giorgio Strehler, 40).
In the summer of 1938, another Strehler inuence, the French director Jacques Copeau, staged As You Like It in the Boboli Gardens. At this point, quite late in his career, Copeau had long since given up his direction of the Vieux-Colombier. He was seriously
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impaired by arteriosclerosis, and was taking on freelance assignments. Unlike Reinhardts expansive use of the space, Copeau re` stricted his mise en scene to the area around a large rock that had been constructed for the production. Within these spatial limitations, Copeaus production was quite spare, described as a belated symbolistic statement . . . [in which] the dream is reality as much as reality is but a dream (Orani, Italian Directors, 63). Through their combination of eclectic, extravagant, fantastical, realistic, and stylized choices, Sharoff, Copeau, and Reinhardt introduced a palette of unlimited possibilities which Strehler absorbed as he began to create his own modern, personal, and eclectic interpretations of Shakespeare upon the stage. Strehler realized when he began work on The Tempest in the Boboli Gardens in 1948 that the setting was far too naturalistic for the poetic style and conventionality of traditional declamatory Italian theater. Therefore, Strehler referred to the work of Sharoff, Reinhardt, and Copeau, and used the natural theatrical space as a metaphor for his romantic, yet unaffected production. The Boboli Gardens had been used for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino since the early 1930s. Perhaps in homage to Reinhardts use of this same space for his A Midsummer Nights Dream in 1933, Strehler set Prosperos island in the middle of the lake, (called the Vasca dei Cignithe swans pool), with an amphitheater around it. The playing area had as its centerpiece a fountain that was designed by Parigi in 1618. In the middle of this fountain was a statue of Neptune by Giambologna. This fountain became a natural theatrical curtain for The Tempest; its jets of water soaring skyward, and creating magical distance between audience and spectacle (Petriccione, Tempo [Milan], June 1948). The water imagery also underscored the stormy magic of the productions opening scene. Various site-specic locations surrounded the island/set. These locales were inspired partly by medieval theatre, and partly by Renaissance chivalric poetry (Hirst, Strehler, 67). The mansionstyle staging of medieval theater was adapted to various locations. Prosperos cell and Calibans grotto were located on the stage right part of the island. The court and Ferdinand were placed downstage left. By positioning the Florentine statuary, dispersed pillars, and stairs around the site, the classical ambience was heightened. Rocks and fantastic vegetation was added, from which Ariels army of sprites emerged. A neutral playing
35
area was also established downstage center. Some of the plays action started in a specic area such as Calibans grotto, and then eventually gravitated down to this central playing space. Hirst noted that there was:
symbolic, almost religious signicance in the fact that the basest actions and lowest forms of civilization were restricted to the outer edges of the setting, whilst the movement toward redemption and experienceon the part of Ferdinand, for instancewas signied by the gradual ascent to the higher area towards the centre of the island. (Hirst, Strehler, 67)
Similarly, the masque was staged at the apex of the island, suggesting that this portion of The Tempests text was also the peak of Prosperos magical power. A progressive isolation overtook Prospero; at the beginning of the play he was interacting with other characters; but at the end he was a solitary gure, surrounded by the shadows which engulfed the island (Castello, Sipario, 23). Scenographer Gianni Rattos rendering of the set depicted a circular peninsula. The downstage two-thirds of the stage area was surrounded by water. At the downstage center was a ight of stairs leading to the pool of water, which extended across the playing area. This playing area at the waters edge was the neutral playing zone for most of the production. Downstage left of this brightly lit area was a dark space with a white, sunburst circle inside it. Prospero invoked his rough magic from within this circle. In the center of the back wall behind the pool was another ight of stairs, beyond which was an open playing area centered on an obelisk. Other playing areas surrounded this area, at least three of which were accessible by ights of stairs. Upstage left of the obelisk was a large statue, and dead center behind the obelisk was an even grander statue. The area behind the obelisk also featured trees and giant rock formations.1 The island was a series of gradual rises, with at least ve playing levels reached by seven different series of steps. From Hirsts account and that of Ettore Gaipa we can presume that the scenes with Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano were played frontstage center, at the lowest level.2 Calibans hut was located stage right-center, a short distance behind the pool, in a thicket
36
of trees. Rather than a hut, it resembled a lean-to tent. The masque scene, Miranda and Ferdinands wedding, and the freeing of Ariel were played at the highest point, the raised area just behind and to the right of the grand statue. Gianni Rattos set design included red and blue dwarf trees, as well as pots of lemon and orange trees that were set around the fountain in the middle of the pool. This foliage camouaged the base of the fountain so that only the statue of Neptune could be seen, surrounded by animals. All of this was fused by architectural vegetation (Quasimoto, Tempesta in Una Vasca), creating a fantastic land that was Prosperos refuge from the corruption of the courts of Milan and Naples. One of the problems created by Strehlers natural setting for this production was the noise of the native frog population in the fountain. The presence of these creatures had, for a long time, been common knowledge to Italian biologists, but apparently not to Strehlers company. During performances, the frogs seemed to respond to the voice of Caliban, giving added credence to his declaration that the isle is full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not (3.2.13335). The performance of the frogs was noted by several of the Italian critics, and was roundly, if perhaps ironically, praised. The audience reached their seats via a long alley of gardens lit by torches. Salvatore Quasimotos review described the production beginning at 9:20 P.M. (undoubtedly waiting for early June darkness to arrive).3 The spectacle began with a costume parade around the Vasca dei Cigni. The performance of The Tempest opened with a baroque sailboat appearing upon the lake. The ship made one complete turn from left to right. Then, articially produced waves, which represented Prosperos tempest, were accompanied by a dimming of lights and ashes of thunder. Orchestral and choral music augmented the tempest, followed by sound effects, and nally, the terried cries of the crew members aboard the sailboat. The water was darkened, while Prospero and Miranda sat in semiobscurity watching this spectacle from stage right. Because the courts of Milan and Naples were positioned onboard the ship, the dialogue of those aboard the ship was acoustically unclear amid the pyrotechnics. When the storm scene ended, the stage light moved from the top of the island downward, with Prospero and Miranda in a freeze. Prospero wore an Elizabethan costume consisting of a rufed collar, and a long,
37
dark gown, cinched at the waist, with color-contrasting epaulettes and cuffs. At the end of their lengthy expository scene, Miranda fell asleep, with music that heralded Ariels entrance from out of the trunk of a tree. Played by Lilla Brignone, Ariel was earth grounded, but spritely and kind (Quasimoto, Tempesta in Una Vasca). Her costume consisted of tight, light-colored knickers and matching top, giving her a Peter Pan quality. Fashioned behind her were elaborate, glittering wings that extended down nearly to her ankles. Her hair was layered high atop her head, almost in approximation of the construction of the island itself. Ariel was well lit during this scene, while Miranda slept in shadow. The sprites in Ariels service emerged from under stones, their faces and hands gray. They seemed to be clay objects. The sprites sudden appearance made them seem like emanations of the island. In harsh contrast to Ariels rst entrance, Caliban slithered onto the stage from the lowest of the stage areas. Indeed, all of Calibans stage time was spent in the lower depths. Ariel, now dressed as a marine nymph, preceded Caliban onstage for his initial appearance. Caliban (Marcello Moretti) was depicted as a grotesque subhuman. He wore pants, boots, and a jacket of very dark and shiny material. Beneath the jacket, Caliban wore an undershirt of a striped design, and also of a shiny texture. When his hands were extended, they revealed misshapen ngers; the thumb and forenger appeared to be of the same length, whereas the middle and ring ngers were extremely long and gnarled, and there was an outsized pinky, nearly the same length as the other two huge digits. Calibans face was a huge, sad-faced mask. No attempt was made to give the face human features. Instead, it bore a doglike quality. He was a slouched, almost hunchbacked gure without a neck. He appeared incapable of standing erect. He moved haltingly, from a crouched, knees-bent position. This Caliban was more frightened than frightening, more to be pitied than to be feared.4 By contrast, the rst appearance of the courtly and heroic Ferdinand was heralded by music. Ferdinand immediately caught the full attention of both Prospero and Miranda. His entrance came from the extreme right. Ariel guided Ferdinand with her voice as she sang him into position with Come unto these yellow sands and Full fadom ve. Enchanted by Ariels singing, Fer-
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dinand followed, ending up before Miranda, her youthful beauty bewitching him. Prospero stood alongside Miranda as he accused Ferdinand of being a traitor. Ferdinand drew his sword and threatened Prospero, before being literally taken to the woodshed: Prospero leading him to the grotto/woodpile on the second level of stage right. The lights faded on Miranda and Prospero, and went up on stage left, revealing the court gures from Milan and Naples. The fatuousness of this group was heightened by their apathy about the loss of Prince Ferdinand. The courtiers were clothed in elegant, Elizabethan costumes of dark jackets, hosiery, and capes. Strehler made it clear that the stiing atmosphere of the courts of Milan and Naples persisted even here amid their wreckage. After the court fell asleep to solemn music, ashen light introduced Antonio and Sebastians treachery. Arriving to a musical accompaniment, Ariel, with an army of wood sprites seemingly in search of Ferdinand, halted their murderous plot. As Ariel and the sprites spread out into the wooded area, Calibans scene with the two clowns began in his grotto/lean-to area. Trinculo entered from the lower left, Stephano from the lower right. Trinculo (Vittorio Caprioli) wore a traditional, Neapolitan/ Pulcinella sinister half-mask, which covered his face down to the bottom of his nose. This choice of mask was particularly appropriate in view of the Neapolitan Pulcinellas reputation for cruel mischief. Trinculo wore a dark and white vertically striped shirt and white trousers. Trinculo and Stephano were played as commedia dellarte gures. While Trinculo was in the tradition of Pulcinella, Stephano was a Brighella prototype: an astute and wily slave, avenging himself upon his masters by robbing them (Richards and Richards, Commedia dellarte, 20). The two clowns portrayed Bergamasque servants and spoke in Venetian and Neapolitan dialects respectively.5 Trinculo was also a commedia juggler and a braggart. Their strength as performers and comical clowns turned Caliban into a plaything, a melancholy buffoon. While they spoke in dialect, Caliban struggled to communicate in a formal, literary style. This inability to effectively interact made Caliban into the dupe, and a terrible and pitiful creation (Quasimoto, Tempesta in Una Vasca), thus underscoring the productions sympathetic reading of Caliban. All of this staging was in the lower area of the stage, with Miranda as silent witness. At the
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conclusion of the scene, she exited toward the rocks at the bottom level above the foliage, bringing the production to the intermission. The second half of The Tempest began with the Miranda/Ferdinand love scene. Shafts of light hit the highest zones of the stage. The light then focused upon Prospero, positioned in the grotto area. Eventually the stage was lit in three different areasthe magic circle from where Prospero orchestrated the scene, the area in which Ferdinand hauled his wood, and the area from which Miranda watched Ferdinand perform his tasks. Throughout this scene Prospero acted as though he were invisible within the connes of his magical clothing and his magic circle. He was rmly in control of the direction of the scene.6 There was a controlled deliberation to the tempo of the love scene. Miranda came toward Ferdinand to assist him with his chores. They moved toward stage center, but their movements were tentative, as though Miranda still remained within Prosperos sphere of inuence and Ferdinand were still an unproven laborer, not yet deserving of the stern fathers approval and the young womans love. The two lovers seemed by their actions to be incapable of making either movements or decisions for themselves; they were pawns in a larger chess game, the situation in which they nd themselves later in the play. As the scene progressed, the focus centered upon the couples separation from the forces that controlled them and upon the disparity and attraction of their two charactersthe development of love between the chivalric society represented by Ferdinands courtly ceremony and Mirandas innocent and underdeveloped worldview. In contrast to this tender scene, Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano performed their commedia dellarte lazzi in a state of advanced drunkenness. Ariels interruptions consisted of noises accentuated by the orchestra. These mysterious sounds then triggered the reactions of commedia dellarte zannis. The scene concluded with the buffos grotesque exit into the area of Prosperos cell. A change of light brought into focus the exhausted courtiers from Milan and Naples in their downstage location. Alonzo was now desperate to nd his lost son, Ferdinand. From high above, Ariel was lowered with her sprites, bringing in the banquet. Gonzalo literally mounted his soapbox, climbing onto the banquet
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table to utter his disbelief over what he had just witnessed. A rapid change of light and music suddenly concluded the wonderment of this scene, creating a mood of solemnity and ceremony for what was to follow. Prospero ofciated over the vows of love between Miranda and Ferdinand. With Ferdinand liberated from his courtly manner and Prospero seeming more conciliatory, the two faced each other as equals.7 The masque scene began from the grotto, at the base of the statue of Neptune. Two opera singers, Renata Broilo and Magda Bronzoni, sang the Goddess roles accompanied by the orchestra and chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The scene was intended to emphasize the musical and visual elements of the celebratory masque. The music was arranged from works by Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti, and, according to Gaipa were intended to underline the central theme of the production; the rediscovery of human values, the journey to a new world, a voyage into the future (La Tempesta 1948). A signicant section of Prosperos interior monologue was cut. He did not speak, these our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air (4.1.14850); instead, the metatheatricality of these lines became an interior subtext rather than an exterior stress point. The idea, Gaipa maintained, was to emphasize the ambivalence of rational sciencethe sense that mankind consists of beings who are capable of both creation and destruction, and not to bring focus to the playacting role of the sprites. Prospero roused himself after Miranda and Ferdinand exited. Ariel told Prospero gleefully of her torment of the three rebels. Prospero and Ariel then planned to set their trap for the comic/ rebels, with the use of Prosperos regal clothing. This bait worked more effectively upon Stephano and Trinculo than upon Caliban, once again singling Caliban out as the outcast within the productionthe lone gure not in on the joke. The three clowns argued among themselves until Ariel called upon her frightful dogs. Terrorized, the three disappeared into the bushes. Music and light introduced the nal cadenza, Prosperos renunciation of his magic. For this, Prospero descended from the highest portion of the playing area, clad for the last time in his magic mantle. This costume consisted of a dark undercoat with a series of snakes patterned within the design. Prosperos dark outer-gown contained light, hollowed-out, white circles, which
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appeared as a moon-design, his appearance accentuating his role as vengeful sorcerer.8 The multiple layers within the human spirit symbolized by Prospero also were reected in the humanity dawning within Ariel as she approached her liberty. After Prospero delivered the Ye elves of hills speech and pronounced this rough magic I here abjure, the court from Milan and Naples gathered around Prosperos magic circle downstage left, where they were immobilized. Prospero then removed his mantle and simultaneously unfroze the court. Before her liberation, however, Ariel performed her nal duties. Prosperos last order to Ariel was to bring forth the crew of the ship and to conduct them to their place in the center of the island, where they were to be released from enchantment. Before their arrival came the recognition and reconciliation between Ferdinand and his father. The entrance of the Boatswain, Caliban, and the comical rebels followed. When Prosperos magic and forgiveness had been dispensed, Ariel was nally liberated. Upon completion of his responsibilities as father, brother, Duke, and judge, Prospero was allowed one nal, extravagant explosion of magnicent magic, and a festival of reworks, accompanied by a rainbow arc of lights exploded around the island. As the smoke from this display began to ebb, Prospero pronounced the epilogue from the downstage center of the playing space. No longer carrying the weight of his magical powers, Prospero was now a man without sorcery or spirits. He simply called for the help of [the] good hands of the audience as he rejoined the world of humanity, and the performance ended.
Strehlers 1948 production of The Tempest was the work of an ambitious and energetic young director. Strehler had opened his production of Richard II on the stage of the Piccolo Theatre just seven weeks before the premiere of The Tempest. This was not a production where all of the details had been carefully weighed. This production, like the young man who directed it, was impulsive, energetic, and promising. Still, there were no doubts of the productions spectacular visual strengths. Looking back upon this early production of The Tempest,
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Strehler was, if anything, overcritical. He wrote: I believe . . . that this was a principal moment in my formative work, even if it was a brutal and violent moment. He admitted that there was little rehearsal, little reection. In reconsidering the production, Strehler felt that Caliban didnt exist, a dismissal that this account seems to contradict. Strehler also remembered what he described as the productions dry style, and noted that both Ariel and Prospero had few dimensions (Inscenare Shakespeare, 22). While the mature Strehler would doubtless have welcomed the opportunity to redirect the characterizations of the principal performers, his perception that this youthful production was dry is not borne out by the evidence. The 1948 production of The Tempest was a great success, theatrically and emotionally. Aviv Orani observed that the young casts enthusiasm supported a general belief in the bright future of man and the theatre, as Italy was emerging from the ashes of the second world-war (Italian Directors of Shakespeare, 268). What Ettore Gaipa had written specically about the masque scene was indeed true for the entire production. Coming so soon after the horrors of World War II, this production which reopened the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino after its enforced termination for the war years underlined the rediscovery of human values, the journey to a new world, a voyage into the future. Perhaps the productions chief contribution to Italian theater and mid-twentieth-century Shakespeare performance history was the promise offered by this staging. This was the effort of a newly created, audacious permanent company. Another of the more signicant contributions of Strehlers 1948 Tempest was its sheer opulence. After the wartime penury which Italy had been forced to endure, the lavish excess of this production indicated a revival of energy, creativity, and nancial potential which augured Italys reentry into the international cultural and economic marketplace. The Tempest allowed Strehler to become more aware of the complexity of some of the problems he would be confronting in his future stagings of Shakespeare. The thorniest of these issues would be the textual problems inherent in working with modern translations of seventeenth-century material and the struggle to balance contemporaneity with a respect for the integrity of the playwrights original text. As he was about to embark upon his
43
lengthy consideration of the Shakespeare canon, Strehler saw that it was incumbent upon the director to challenge the impossible. In a moment of glorious understatement, Strehler observed that this production led him to the realization that Shakespeare was a problematic writer.
3
Peter Brook: The Tempest, 1957
Directors in the theatre are self-appointed. An unemployed director is a contradiction in terms, like an unemployed painterunlike an unemployed actor, who is a victim of circumstances. You become a director by calling yourself a director and then you persuade people that this is true . . . I dont know any other way apart from convincing people to work with you and getting some work under way . . . and presenting it to the publicin a cellar, in the back room of a pub, in a hospital ward, in a prison. The energy produced by working is more important than anything else. Peter Brook, The Shifting Point
IN 1945, WHEN PETER BROOK ENTERED THE PROFESSIONAL BRITISH

theater world as a director, he was twenty years old. Given his youthfulness, it is not surprising that his arrival evoked numerous references to his age. He was called a boy wonder,, a boy genius, the golden boy, and a prodigy. These allusions to Brooks precocity could have been anticipated, for his childhood already indicated his career choice. By the time Brook was ve years old, he was calling himself a director. In deference to this self-proclaimed title, his parents soon presented him with a completely equipped model theater.1 It was within this miniature laboratory that Brook began his experiments and exercises, his rehearsals and performances. Kenneth Tynan notes that before long his father came across a manuscript headed: HAMLET, by P. Brook and W. Shakespeare (Golden Boy, 20). Brooks relationship with William Shakespeare was thus established early, as was the order of the billing within their collaboration. Over the next six decades, few directors would rival him in placing their own imprint upon the Shakespeare canon. In 1942, while a student at Oxford, Brook staged a production of Christopher Marlowes Doctor Faustus at the Torch Theatre 44
3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957
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in London, with an amateur cast. His rst professionally staged production was Jean Cocteaus Infernal Machine, performed at the Chanticleer Theatre Club in London in 1945. Soon after, Brook directed Pygmalion for the Entertainments National Service Association. This production led to an invitation from Sir Barry Jackson of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to direct a production of King John. Brook cast Paul Scoeld as Philip the Bastard. An alliance between the director and the actor was quickly formed, with Brook and Scoeld working together on seven major productions over the next seven years. The rst of these efforts was the 1946 production of Loves Labours Lost at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where Brook found his inspiration in Watteaus painting, The Age of Gold. The identication of a visual correlative (Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 166), a scenographic metaphor which could supply meaning and relevance to a contemporary audience was important to Brooks early directorial efforts. The production of Loves Labours Lost included a chalk-faced commedia dellarte clown who might also be traceable to Watteaus portraits of commedia characters. This was an appropriate commedia choice for Brooks production. Jean-Baptiste Deburau developed the character of Pierrot in Paris in the early nineteenth century. Pierrot was pale as the moon, mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent, straight and tall as the gallows (Duchartre, Italian Comedy, 260). Audrey Williamson described Brooks clown character in Loves Labours Lost as a Deburau-like zany (Old Vic Drama, 33). Like Deburaus Pierrot, the clown in Brooks Loves Labours Lost never spoke, serving as a dark and silent witness within the stage picture. Brooks production also was marked by an eclectic combination of theatrical forms and references, which included a comic Victorian bobby interpretation of Dull, costumed in helmet and truncheon and carrying a string of sausages (Williams, Brook Casebook, 4). Williamsons account of the production saw among its excesses an unnecessary bevy of trumpeters aloft, as well as a ballet of Hogarthian sluts shaking their sts at the monastic pronouncement on the gates of the park (Old Vic Drama, 33). The production of Loves Labours Lost led to Brook being hailed as the legitimate successor to Komisjarevsky (Tynan, Everybodys).2 Like Brook, Theodore Komisjarevsky (18821954) was a sig-
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nicant British director with Russian roots. Brooks Watteau-like commedia effects shared several elements with Komisjarevskys productions of The Merchant of Venice (1932), and The Comedy of Errors (1938). At this early stage of his career, Brook developed a dramaturgical sense of what the role of the director was to be within the theatrical exchange. Tynan quoted Brook on this responsibility: It is the directors job to restore to the work of art what it has lost in its passage from the authors dream to the authors manuscript. Later in that same article, Tynan reected upon Brooks vision and directorial philosophy during this early stage of his directorial development. In the process, Tynan seemed to be describing Brook as Prospero-in-training:
. . . And here Brook stood, between the dream and the text, subtly inuencing both.
Paul Scoeld was Armado in this production of Loves Labours Lost. Scoeld spoke of Brooks process of working with actors during this boy wonder stage in his directorial development:
. . . Peter made me think . . . in relation to the play as a whole, and the part that the character took in the general pattern of what the author was assembling . . . you could feel him becoming a director of actors rather than simply a director of plays. (Hayman, Playback, 6162).
Brook had a concept for the play by the time of the rst reading (ibid., 61). Nevertheless, the production of Loves Labours Lost was also the occasion for Brooks abandonment of a meticulous, completely planned prerehearsal set model and blocking strategy. Thereafter, Brook attempted to design his visual elements as the result of the development of the work-in-progress. This marked ` the beginning of his practice of seeing that the mise en sce ne evolved from the dynamics of the rehearsal process. In 1947 Brook directed Romeo and Juliet, also at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, with Scoeld playing Mercutio. This production found its point of emphasis in mad blood and hot days (from Benvolios act 3, scene 1 lines: And if we meet we shall not scape a brawl, / For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring). The prevailing judgment about Brook at this stage in his career was that his work oundered until he
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found a vital, central image upon which to focus his production.3 In Loves Labour it was Watteau: in Romeo and Juliet it emanated from that one line of text. Romeo and Juliet was performed on an octagonal stage with towers and turrets, creating a fairy-tale atmosphere. The stage oor was a sand-red cloth. In the production there were also some minimalist touches, effects that would re-echo in Brooks 1990 production of The Tempest. A own canopy depicted the Capulets house; a bare, white wall represented the balcony, an open marble stairway was Juliets bedroom, and the entire stage picture was topped by a great empty indigo sky (Beauman, Royal Shakespeare Company, 182). Brook explained this early use of minimalism for a production of Romeo and Juliet, calling it . . . a play of wide spaces in which one tree on a bare stage can suggest the loneliness of a place of exile; one wall, as in Giotto, an entire house (cited by J. C. Trewin in Paul Scoeld, 45). However, the set design for Romeo and Juliet subjected Brook to the harshest reviews of his early career. The production was criticized for its unfamiliar, skeletal setting. Critics found fault with the production for obscuring Shakespeare through its unfortunate cuts and for emphasizing pictorial splendor. Perhaps Brooks most highly praised commercial work during this early period in his directorial career was his 1949 staging of Dark of the Moon, a North Carolina backwoods melodrama by Howard Richardson and William Berney. This success was followed, later in 1949, by The Olympians, an adaptation of Richard Strausss opera based on Oscar Wildes Salome. Brook collaborated with Salvador Dali on this staging, which was performed at Covent Garden. The success of this production led Brook to boast that his next effort with Dali would be in the open air, with armies and airplanes. However, this mammoth artistic collaboration never occurred. During this period, Brooks work in classical theater was countered and yet strongly inuenced by his direction of the works of such prominent contemporary playwrights as Jean Anouilh (Ring Around the Moon, 1950), John Whiting (Penny for a Song, 1951) and Christopher Fry (The Dark is Light Enough, 1954).4 Despite these works commercial nature, the discovery of visual poetry within performance work was an important factor in Brooks evolving style. This focus upon a more physical theater was somewhat analogous to Jean-Louis Barraults ideal of total
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theatre, that is, theater . . . approached as a total physical and psychic experience (Carlson, Theories of the Theatre 397). Yet Barraults sense of what Artaud had described as an alchemy within the spoken textnot as idea, but as gesture and action and Brooks evolving concept of the stage as an empty space which was then to be lled by the actors freedom and ability to unite the physical world with the subjective experience of the audience, which would thus become more involved in this exchangewere quite dissimilar. To Brook, deadly theater was the standard fare of the West Endclassical plays performed as though they were museum pieces, social problem plays patterned after Shaw, and Noel Coward-like elitist, drawing-room comedies. Brooks rebellion against this brand of deadly theater was its antithesis: lively theater. Brook continued staging Shakespeare throughout the early 1950s. In 1950 he directed a production of Measure for Measure at Stratford, which also toured to West Germany. In this production, John Gielgud played Angelo. The staging was inuenced by the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch. This was also Brooks rst attempt at taking control of virtually all of a productions aspects. While still working within a team, Brook did most of the design work on the sets and costumes, as well as composing the music for the Pages song (Hayman, Gielgud, 169). The set design, much of which was torch-lit, included a cloister stretching upstage in two directions from a central point; it contained three doors through which most of the characters passed. The Renaissance paintings of Bosch and Brueghel informed the productions focus upon human folly, with ` the mise en scene underlining the bawdy world of Viennese lowlife (Pollack, Peter Brook, 23). Looking back upon this production in The Empty Space, Brook wrote that this Measure for Measure showed the two elements, Holy and Rough (theater), almost schematically, side by side. They are opposed, and they coexist (88). The terms deadly theater and holy theater and rough theater indicate the fusion of Brooks work as stage director with his concurrently expanding role as theatrical theorist and adapter of others theatrical philosophies. In The Empty Space, Brook wrote of the danger of producing classical stage works without proper attention to current times and contemporary au-
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diences (36). This failure to meet the challenge of contemporaneity, according to Brook, would result in deadly theater, characterized by old formulae, old methods, (and) old effects (Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 464). Brook began seeing holy theater and rough theater as viable alternatives to, and remedies for such performative fossilization. Holy theater, which Brook attributed to the theatrical theories of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, was theater that was visionary, and spiritually grounded, attempting to make the invisible visible (ibid.). Brook described holy theater as aspiring to touch, in the special conditions, something beyond the surface of everyday life. Rough theater was also a term which was nding its way into Brooks performance vocabulary. Typied by Bertolt Brechts work, rough theater attempted to bring renewal to theatre by returning to the popular sources of real life (Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 464). Brook began attempting the incorporation of these occasionally clashing styles into his productions. Eventually Brook would see theater as the means whereby sacred, special conditions could be created (Brook, Peter Brook, South Bank Show interview). Gradually, Brook blended these diverse elements into his own work, which he termed the immediate theater. To Marvin Carlson, this was a theatrical form which aspired to link audience and production in a celebration of experience, briey achieving a totality that may leave a permanent image in the minds of its participants (Theories of the Theatre, 464). In the 1950s these transcendent theatrical stagings were largely imaginary; their impact upon Brooks productions would not come until the 1960s. Yet Brooks productions of the 1950s give indications of the direction in which he next turned. In 1951, Brook again directed John Gielgud, this time in The Winters Tale, in a production at the Phoenix Theatre in London as part of the Festival for Britain, and later at the 1951 Edinburgh Festival. This production again used eclectic stage references. It used Elizabethan conventions like upper and inner stages, alcoves and side galleries. However, the storm which concluded the rst half of the play was described by Ossia Trilling as surrealist . . . a real Victorian snowstorm (Shakespeare Quarterly, July 1951, 2). Early in his career, Brook considered direction and designing to be inseparable. The Holy Grail he sought in this dual ca-
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pacity was a singular, dening image for the work. The change in Brooks philosophy came when he began to see that an overall unifying image was unnecessary, and ultimately limiting. Brook came to believe that the works of Shakespeare, in particular, were impeded by the unity that the imagination of one director or designer imposed upon the work. Brook would not do another Shakespeare production until 1955. That production, Titus Andronicus, exemplied Brooks ability to stretch the imagination while continuing his experimentation with the role of the director within the creative process. His production of Titus Andronicus was to reinforce his move away from a concept of one overall unifying image. Titus Andronicus was an all-star production. Laurence Olivier played Titus, with Vivien Leigh as Lavinia and Anthony Quayle as Aaron. Accomplishing this reconsideration of Titus Andronicus took eight months, and began with the creation of an evocative playing space. Brook constructed a huge, wood-paneled superstructure, with square pillars capable of different positions for new scenes (Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 168). The monumental set seemed to borrow from the sculptures of Sir Jacob Epstein, with its use of barbed-wire and squared pillars. This set design also had the capability of creating a sense of multiple locations. The feeling of connement which the production created was augmented by the lighting which was shadowy, smoky . . . aring with the torches whose ames were contained within strange distorted cages (Beauman, Royal Shakespeare Company, 225). Among the most signicant features of this production was its stylization, the primal terror of the plays most horrible and grotesque moments. This was achieved through a number of in` novations. The musique concrete supported the clash of primitive forces and, like his scenography, rendered it abstract (Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 168). Brook also adapted Asian theatrical technique to assist in the diffusion of the violence. Lavinias appearance after her rape and mutilation was staged in a dimly lit forest. Scarlet and red streamers that dropped from her wrists and mouth represented her owing blood.5 This stylization of one of the plays most violent moments mitigated the horrifying physical gore of the moment while emphasizing Lavinias emotional agony. Kennedy wrote of the almost Asian symbolism of the meta-
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theatrical approach to the violence of the piece. To further prevent a production that might be considered Grand Guignol, whenever the text threatened to descend from barbaric dignity it was cut (Beauman, Royal Shakespeare Company, 224). Beauman referred to Brooks resolution of the plays extravagances as formaliz(ing) the horrors, conn(ing) them within a ritualistic framework so that the agonies were distanced, episodes in a black progress towards greater and greater atrocity (ibid., 225). As another indication of Brooks movement away from one single, vital image, there was heightened signicance to the changing colors and tones of the production. The wide variety of colors used at the beginning of Titus Andronicus yielded gradually to the dominant use of shades of red as the bloodshed increased. This monochromatic palette created the image of an aesthetic civilizations descent into ruin because of its blood lust. The colors of the costumes contributed to both the thematic consistency and the shadowy tone of the production. Critics wrote of the bile greens and the liver-ish colour of dried blood. Indeed, universal dried red blood permeated both the costumes and the sets superstructure. Kennedys description of almost Asian symbolism and Beaumans references to ritual and distancing (she also wrote of dislocation, threat, and unease) indicate Brooks absorption of both the Brechtian and Artaudian theatrical vocabulary, and attest to Brooks eclectic borrowing of various styles and theories for this production. Jan Kott wrote of Brooks introduction of lm conventions into theatre, his use of blackouts in which scenes fade, one into the other, as in lm (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 286). Furthermore, as Harold Hobson observed, to an audience which had only recently borne witness to the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, the brutality within the text of the play was no longer ridiculous or excessive, and hardly laughable. Titus Andronicus toured Europe in 1957, shortly before Brook directed The Tempest. Jan Kott saw the production of Titus Andronicus in Warsaw in June of 1957, only two months before the Stratford opening of The Tempest. The meeting of Kott and Brook began the important theatrical/theoretical relationship between the two men. Their rst encounter in Warsaw led to many discussions between scholar and practitioner, culminating in Kotts contributions to Brooks 1962 production of King Lear. In 1957, however, Kott viewed the production of Titus Andron-
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icus from the perspective of an Eastern European intellectual, unfamiliar with both Brook and his work. In an essay on the production, Kott made extensive reference to the Renaissance and seventeenth-century masters whose inuence he saw in Brooks production of Titus:
He has freely taken a full range of yellows from Titian, dressed his priests in the irritating greens of Veronese. The Moor, in his blackblue-and-gold costume is derived from Rubens. The scene in the camp of the Goths where Aaron is tortured and tormented in a cage made up of big ladders also looks like Rubens. (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 283)
Kott noted the Renaissance painters for Brooks Titus inspiration, but Kenneth Tynan looked to Goya when he anticipated Brooks theatre of cruelty period in the 1960s:
Like . . . Disasters of War, this is tragedy naked, godless, and unredeemed, a carnival of carnage in which pity is the rst man down. . . . The result is the nest Shakespearean production since the same director tackled Measure for Measure ve years ago. (Curtains, 1034)
What was perhaps most important to Jan Kott was the validation this production gave to his own concept of a contemporary and absurdist Shakespeare. The production of Titus Andronicus coincided with a volatile theatrical, social, and political period in modern English history. The British political and social historian Christopher Booker saw the mid-1950s as focus for an entire series of sea-changes that were to rock English society for the next forty years (Neophiliacs, 35). In 1956, England and France brought their troops into Egypt, when its premier, Abdul Nassar, attempted to nationalize the Suez Canal. Also in 1956, the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union began. The Cold War was at its height, and the specter of a nuclear holocaust loomed large. This tense period also marked a transition point in the development of international theater for the next ve decades. Most noteworthy about the performance-related change during this period was the impact of international theater as both result and active agent within this exchange. Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot opened in London in August of 1955. Ronald Haymans book British Theatre since
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1955 began its survey in 1955 precisely because of the London premiere of Godot, heightening the perception that the plays London debut was a landmark event in British theater history. Then, shortly after Bertolt Brechts death in August of 1956, the Berliner Ensemble traveled to London. John Willett viewed this visit as the turning point in British theater, calling the Berliner Ensembles London season: . . . an event that changed the face of the English theatre (Re-Interpreting Brecht, 76). In May of 1956, the same unrest that produced dynamic foreign productions hit full force with the opening of London-born John Osbornes Look Back in Anger. This production was seen as yet another turning point in postwar English theater. The arrival in such short order of the works of Beckett, Brecht, and Osborne upon the British theater scene marked a signicant turning away from a world of deadly theater and indicated the arrival of something rich and strange; a world of theatrical upheaval in which Peter Brook was to play a pivotal role. Indeed, Brook soon did his part to fan the ames of theatrical turmoil. In October of 1956 his production of Arthur Millers A View from the Bridge expanded the long one-act structure which was how the play had been performed in New York transforming the work into a full-length play. In order to prevent censorship from the Lord Chancellor, the production was performed in a private club, the Watergate Theatre Club in London, where the plays suggestion of homosexuality, climaxed by an onstage kiss, could be performed with impunity. The production helped to contribute to this general feeling of something dangerous going on within mid-century British drama. This emerging face of English theater was related to theatrical change it was absorbing from elsewhere. In April of 1957, the German director Peter Zadek staged a controversial production of French playwright Jean Genets The Balcony at the Arts Theatre in London (a production that the playwright loathed). Artauds The Theatre and its Double, although still a year away from its rst English translation, was beginning to cause a stir throughout Europe, and would shortly affect British performance as well. Something was indeed in the wind. The English theater critic Harold Hobson, in his 1984 memoir of a generation of playgoing, Theatre in Britain: A Personal View, wrote of the enormous vitality of the mid-fties. At the same time, Hobson wrote as though Beckett and Brecht were Brit-
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ains own, with England deserving much of the credit for their success:
. . . four plays had so changed the national outlook that concern for the spiritual welfare of an individual seemed a new blasphemy. The plays in question were Bertolt Brechts Mother Courage (1955), Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot (1955), John Osbornes Look Back in Anger (1956), and Harold Pinters The Birthday Party (1958). They mark the most brilliant years of modern British drama . . . almost destroyed the commercial theatre, stimulated the move towards the establishment of the National Theatre, encouraged the proliferation of fringe theatres and the theory that entertainment in a play is a mark of mindless frivolity. (Hobson, Theatre in Britain, 183)
In Post-war British Theatre, John Elsom saw the correlation between Britains angst and despair from World War II, coupled with the demise of colonialism, as the principal causes of the disturbing and angry tone to be found in this new theater. He wrote:
. . . in the mid-50s, the most positive political attitude which Britain could take was that of opting out. This was the period of de-colonialisation, of slowly re-building and re-directing British industry after the war, of a necessary stasis. The most futile gestures (such as the Suez campaign . . .) partly derived from a failure to recognize this fact. It was psychologically hard to adjust from a wartime situation, when there were causes to ght for, to a peacetime one, when such causes could prove quixotic or excuses for bullying. If nationally the best policy seemed to be a cultivation of ones own garden which had fallen into neglect, internationally we were surrounded with awful warnings. (7374)
The foreboding warnings of which Elsom wrote were indeed being cultivated within Britains own garden and were beginning to be reected on its stages. Earlier in the postwar period Peter Brook had written: However hard a producer or designer may strive to mount a classic with complete objectivity, he can never avoid reecting a second periodthe one in which he works and lives (Style in Shakespeare Production, 139). This period of awful warnings in the mid-1950s was a time which provided cause for reection. If these tensions were the contributing factors to the anger, alienation, and pessimism that were being written into the periods new drama, it would seem foolhardy to
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assume that this same angst and despair would not nd its way into representations of the classical productions of the period as well. In this environment Peter Brook set to work on his 1957 production of The Tempest. Nevertheless, despite this prevailing international sense of midcentury gloom, despair, and social change, Brooks production of The Tempest did, in fact, largely gloss over contemporary issues. Despite the undercurrent of darkness and melancholy that pervaded the physical look of the production, this proved a rather straightforward and traditional approach to the play. In his 1968 book The Empty Space, Brook wrote of The Tempest:
. . . nothing in the play is what it seems . . . it takes place on an island and not an island, during a day and not during a day, with a tempest that sets off a series of events that are still within a tempest even when the storm is done, that the charming pastoral for children naturally encompasses rape, murder, conspiracy, and violence; when we begin to unearth the themes that Shakespeare so carefully buried, we see that it is his complete nal statement, and that it deals with the whole condition of man. (9495)
Any attempt to stage the whole condition of man sounds like an overambitious blueprint for failure. Indeed, looking back upon the 1957 production, Peter Brook wrote in his 1993 book The Open Door that the failures and deciencies of this production may have come about as a result of his overemphasis upon the plays spectacle and pyrotechnics. Brooks critical memory is countered by David William, who in The Tempest on the Stage, wrote rst of the general pitfall of productions of The Tempesta propensity for fanciful and dramatic stage devices and exaggerated detail and peripheral fuss (134). William then excludes Brooks 1957 production from this tradition, praising the productions Inigo Jonesinuenced formal set, and Brooks splendidly staged yet comparatively simple shipwreck (134). Along with visual references to Inigo Jones, the opening storm scene shared something with the stage design of Edward Gordon Craig in its use of visual synecdoche. Thus, a single rope hung from the ies as a representation of the mast and distant bowsprit, an unsteadily rocking lantern symbolizing the dangerously listing ship.
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Brooks production of The Tempest opened at the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 13 August 1957, where it was the nal play of the season. It was later brought to London, where it played at Drury Lane, for a seven-week Christmas season. The production saw some minor adjustments over the course of its transfer, and the roles of the goddesses Iris, Ceres, and Juno were recast, perhaps indicating a change in the masque scenes emphasis. I have attempted to note wherever these staging revisions occurred.6 The opening storm scene found Alonzo (Robert Harris), Antonio (Mark Dignam), Gonzalo (Cyril Luckham), and Sebastian (Robin Lloyd) in formal poses, looking skyward in an appeal to the heavens. Their Elizabethan costumes, consisting of dark robes with modest, ruffed, or turnover collars suggested a painting by one of the Dutch masters. Alonzo stood apart from the other courtiers, behind and to the right of them, clutching a mast rope. The ships crew was facing the back, behind the principals, their full effort given to the management of the ship in the storm. At the rear of stage left was a high pole, suggesting the ladder to the crows nest, safety, and freedom. A rope ladder was stretched and extended at rear stage left. Various other ropes and wires were hung about the set to create the nautical effect. Ariel was positioned downstage center, waving to create the tempest. When the storm began to subside, the stage was reset as Prosperos island. This was not a fruitful isle of lush and lusty grass, but rather a craggy, rock-hard, dark, and cavernous place. Prospero and Miranda faced each other across the stage, watching as the ship endured the storm and disappeared into the distance. Prospero struck a formal pose, appearing Neptune-like, as though he were a sea-god who had just demonstrated his mastery over his domain. He wore a dark-colored tunic over his right shoulder, his left shoulder bare.7 Prosperos costume also included a oor-length owing cape, hooked at the neck, and he held a stick/scepter in his right hand. This Prospero was youthful, stern, and powerful looking.8 He stared solemnly out as Miranda (Doreen Aris) cowered on the ground beneath him and to his left. She was positioned with her two hands outstretched upon the ground, her arms keeping her pointed toward her father as she implored him to stop the tempest. She wore a long, dark, sleeveless dress and sandals. The islands craggy rocks and caverns
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could be seen behind the characters, contributing to the sense that this was indeed a dark and gloomy place.9 Once Prospero magically spelled Miranda into sleep, he summoned Ariel. Prospero shed his cape, standing over a cowering Ariel, who, like Miranda, was posed as submissive to Prospero. Ariel (Brian Bedford) was extremely youthful, looking like an awestruck altar boy.10 He leaned forward, defensively, ngers extended, almost as though he were expecting to be caned by Prospero, who stood with his staff extended in his outstretched right arm, staring down upon him. Ariel was dressed in a light-colored, diaphanous, long-sleeved, one-piece tunic with fringed edges, which contributed to his innocent appearance.11 The entrance of Caliban (Alec Clunes) suggested an interesting pattern within the production. In these introductory scenes Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban crouched or knelt, so that no one was permitted to view Prospero at eye level. Prospero coldly glared at Caliban who, like Ariel, raised his arms to ward off the blows that he feared would come. Calibans hair was pageboy length, matted and unkempt. He wore a abby bodysuit which gave him large and sagging breasts, and an ample belly. He was not a young man, but a dirty and wizened character, near to Prosperos own age, and he spoke from out of the side of his mouth. For the Antonio-Sebastian conspiracy scene, Gonzalo, Adrian, and Alonzo slept downstage center, using rocks as their pillows. When Antonio and Sebastian, both wearing sinister dark beards and moustaches, approached from behind with their swords drawn, Ariel appeared from upstage left, poised like a master fencer. His magic easily thwarted their plot to assassinate Alonzo. Ferdinand (Richard Johnson) was a handsome, dark-haired young man dressed in a owing white shirt, and short, tight-tothe-thigh pantaloons. His costume was completed by a cape and a thick, dark sash. In the scene in which Prospero eavesdropped as Ferdinand and Miranda professed their mutual love, Prospero loomed over them like a god, ten feet above and behind the two lovers.12 In this scene there was, again, a cavelike quality to the setting with its grainy, rocklike environment.13 Before the intervention of Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand were staged in an intimate, reclining position upon the ground. The costuming for the production was eclectic. The characters were costumed within groups; the courtiers were dressed in Elizabethan style. For his moments of spellbinding magic, Prospero
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donned a silver cloak.14 Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand, betting their status as Italian nobles, were costumed in clothing that reected Roman style. Prospero and Mirandas one-shouldered, more primitive-looking tunics connoted their existence as somewhere in between that of the courtiers and the island creatures. Caliban and Ariel were dressed to suit their fantastical characters. In both his demeanor and costume, Ariel was angelic and ethereal, whereas Caliban was a mud-laden, earth-grounded monster. Both the clowns augmented their Elizabethan costuming with modern accoutrements. Stephano (Patrick Wymark) wore an English derby. The wide-eyed Trinculo (Clive Revill) was costumed in baggy white running shorts, Turkish slippers, a padded, quilted yellow rain slicker, and a top hat worn at a rakish angle. In his scenes with these vaudevillians, Caliban wore a battered Panama hat, and in what might be perceived as an homage to the recent success of Waiting for Godot, there was much in the way of comic hat-business among the two clowns and Caliban. They performed vaudevillian hat tricks as they contemplated their fates on this Jacobean no mans land. Brook staged the masque as an elaborate entertainment. The island was transformed in full view of the audience. Once this change was accomplished, seventeen goddesses, reapers, and sprites performed for Ferdinand and Miranda. The young lovers were seated on benches on stage left, with Prospero lurking above them. The masque was presented as an entertainment that was offered as a gift to Ferdinand and Miranda by Prospero. Prospero, like Hamlet in the mousetrap scene, watched his intended audience in the act of observation. His scrutiny of Ferdinand and Miranda as they watched the masque was analogous to a stage director seeking to determine the impact his work was having upon his audience. The stage was open behind the masquers, with a dark, arched frame set off in the background, and a Victorian cloud machine at the center. The heightened joy and promise of the masque scene was manifested by the lighting and scenography of this stage picture; it was one of the few occasions in the production where there was any suggestion of open space or airiness upon Prosperos dark island. Yet this moment of promise was short-lived. J. C. Trewin wrote that when Prospero abruptly halted the masque, He uses his staff as if it is truly an instrument of power . . . Kenneth Tynan supported this observation, describing the masque scene as this
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productions crowning achievement. Brooks dancers and goddesses created a silhouette by relight, only to be forced to vanish like the insubstantial pageant they were representing when Gielgud wielded Prosperos wand, intoning, we are such stuff as dreams are made on.15 Four words were continually repeated during the masque: barns, garners, vines, plants. This verbal repetition became an incantation, perhaps serving as a link between this rather traditional interpretation of the play and Brooks 1968 experimental pulverization of the text of The Tempest, in which dramaturgical shorthand would steer the production.16 As the production continued into the scene in which Miranda and Ferdinand were discovered over their game of chess, a cavernous, darkly somber quality permeated the stage. Prospero was positioned downstage wearing his full monarchical regalia crown, chain of ofce, scepter, as well as robe and cape. He gestured to Miranda and Ferdinand who sat upstage at a table, with the chessboard set between them. Alonzo stood in a diagonal line between Prospero and the young lovers; his reaction to the discovery of his son was the focus of the scene. Sebastian, who was on that same diagonal line behind Alonzo, seemed to be in awe and bewilderment over this revelation of Prosperos power. However, Sebastians wonder dissipated by the time Prospero acknowledged his responsibility for Caliban. This moment became a proscenium stage picture indicative of The Tempests dependence upon Prospero as the force behind all the dramas action. The company was positioned on the beach; the stage lit for twilight. Standing downstage left were Gonzalo, Alonzo, and Sebastian. Both Gonzalo and Alonzo looked on intently, while Sebastian gazed offstage vacantly, seemingly impervious to the scene. Prosperos rebuke had no impact upon him. Kneeling in front of this group were Stephano and Trinculo. Ariel stood formally in the background; in expectation of Prosperos release, he was staring straight out, like a soldier in military review. Kneeling downstage center was Caliban. Behind him and to his right was Prospero, once again glowering down on him. Prosperos usurping brother Antonio stood off to Prosperos left; like Sebastian, he peered offstage absently. Miranda and Ferdinand were coupled behind Antonio, with Adrian standing upstage center of Ferdinand. An outline of a tree was seen behind Adrian, again a rare sign of life upon this dreary island. Perhaps this bit of foliage
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served as harbinger of the plays concluding suggestion of a more hopeful tomorrow. Indeed, the production was intended to conclude on a note of optimism and celebration. David L. Hirst described the staging of this scene as the governing super-objective vivid physical life at the climax of the play . . . transforming the stage into the ship bound for Naples with Prospero triumphantly at the helm (Text and Performance, 57). Gielgud recalled:
Brook conceived the last scene in the play as the great triumph for Prospero returning home to accept a dukedom; I had a beautiful blue robe with a coronet which I placed on my head as Ariel dressed me. At the end, as I moved to the back of the stage, some ropes fell from above, the other characters turned their backs to the audience, and the scene changed, and became a ship sailing away, then I turned and came down to the front to speak the Epilogue. (Cook, This Rough Magic, 164)
Despite this nal moments triumph, Gielgud and Brook devised a Prospero who had been weathered and deeply saddened by the necessity for such power and intervention. The review of The Tempest in the New Statesman observed that Gielguds Prospero appeared throughout the performance as though he had been victimized and wronged. As such, Prospero was tormented by the temptation for revenge. His magic became the vehicle for his vengeance, driving him toward emotionally dangerous terrain. Prosperos struggle with his powers was terrifying to him, undercutting his pride in his magical abilities, and serving as the driving force behind the plays bittersweet climax. Hirst saw Gielguds Prospero as a character that came to the realization that the quest for revenge was futile. Prosperos epiphany was that of a scientist who has learned that man has controlled nature only when he has ceased doing battle with it (57). As such, Hirst described this interpretation of Prospero as Baconian.17 When Prospero yielded up his magical power and curbed his anger, his relief over nally being able to abdicate became a more overwhelming emotion than his contrition. It was this combination of anger, relief, guilt, and fear that were most intriguing in trying to resolve whether Gielguds Prospero was some kind of cold-war icon. Was he intended to be the representation of a modern potentate, awesome with nuclear
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power while despairing over the necessity for having to wield such mighty weaponry?18 In his Punch review, Eric Keown made reference to what seemed to have been a troubling discord to some critics of this production. Keown wrote of the seeming disparity between the entertainment that Brook mounted and the performance of Prospero that Gielgud enacted. Brooks menu of gas-globes . . . sequined toadstools . . . [and] immense, airborne sea-urchins, distract by their own wizardry from the wizardry of Prospero.19 Keowns criticism suggests that perhaps the problem with this production of The Tempest is that it was unclear who the real Prospero (and thus the real magician) was, Gielgud or Brook. In this production, Prospero diffused his powers through introspection, but Gielguds Prospero gained the maturity to control the wisdom found within his treasured books. This Tempest, while glorying in the potential for wondrous pyrotechnical and visual effects, did not emphasize the potency of the magic of Prospero. In the spring 1958 issue of Drama, J. W. Lambert, London critic and staunch defender of the middle ground, reviewed this production of The Tempest:
The most overtly experimental of recent Shakespeare productions . . . the largest in scale . . . also the least effective. Mr. Brook of course produced, designed the scenery and costumes (which managed to be both fanciful and bleak) and composedif thats the right wordthe musique concrete: those tape-recorded twangs and groans which had ` been remarkably effective in Titus Andronicus, here only added to the general sense of chilly unease. A cast for the most part known to be capable of ne work plodded through scene after scene; who would have supposed that Alec Clunes would make so little of Caliban? Sir John Gielgud, returning to Prospero, offered a man not a magus and not, for once, too old; cropped, anguished, he spoke beautifully but curtly; his relations with Caliban, with Miranda, even with Ariel seemed distraught and impatient.
This review reads like the analysis of a tradition-bound critic striving, but failing, to make much sense of a production that attempted to demystify Shakespeares Tempest and Prospero. Brooks frustration with such analysis and dismissal was quick. Almost immediately after the production ended its run at Stratford, he wrote An Open Letter to William Shakespeare, or As I Dont Like It which appeared in the Sunday Times on 1 Septem-
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ber 1957. The letter was apparently a reaction to such critics as Lambert. Brooks letter to his collaborator read in part:
. . . I should have been preparing myself to realize that The Tempest was your gravest mistake. I of course had wrongly held that it was your nest play; I had imagined it to be a Faust in reverse, the last in your nal cycle of plays about mercy and forgiveness, a play that is throughout its length a storm, reaching calm waters only in its nal pages. I had felt that you were in your right mind when you made it hard, craggy and dramatic. I felt that it was no accident that in the three plots you contrast a lonely, truth-seeking Prospero with lords cruel and murderous, with greedy and darkly wicked clowns. And I felt that you had not suddenly forgotten about the rules of playwriting, such as the one of making every character like someone-or other in the audience, but you had deliberately put your greatest masterpiece a little farther away from us onto a higher level. Now, after reading all the notices, I nd that The Tempest is your worst play the very worst, this timeand I must apologize to you for failing to disguise its weakness more thoroughly. Fortunately, I became aware of my mistake while still at Stratford . . . (Reprinted in The Shifting Point, 7275)
In this letter, perhaps we can read the frustration that would drive Brook, within the decade, away from English theater. Indeed, there was a remarkable summary, conclusion, and prophecy in Kenneth Tynans article and interview with Peter Brook dated 7 May 1955, two years before this production of The Tempest. In that article, Tynan anticipated what it was that would eventually turn Brook from England, and what would move him in the directions which his work would take over the next thirty years:
In England, depressingly there is a limit to what one can accomplish in theatre. There is no state-run playhouse in which to create a ` permanent tradition. In France, Brook would have joined the Comedie Francaise and, by now, seceded to form his own company. In the West End he must jump from play to play, cast to cast, without a chance to consolidate his gains, or to move the front line forwards. He has in fact ourished in the wrong country, though he has shown it the right theatrical way. On post-war achievement he is the best director in London. But, more than that, he was born in the wrong epoch. He belongs to the future because he is obsessed not by words, but by sights and
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sensations. We are living at the end of the era of the word: soon, the quicker responses of the eye may be ofcially paramount. Brook, who sees plays with a deep-focus clarity which few contemporaries can rival, is the prophet of that unborn time, when to show in images will be more than to tell in phrases, when to demonstrate will be more than to speak (Golden Boy, 20)
That unborn time was quickly approaching, and the international theatrical community was hastening to summon Brook to stage its stories.
4
Peter Brooks Experiment: The 1968 Tempest
One misunderstanding hampers work in the theatre enormously. Thinking that what the author puts down on the paper . . . is a form. If you think that, youre completely lost. Its the awful approach to Shakespeare which says: We have to do the play as Shakespeare wrote it. Rubbish! No one knows what was going on in his head. All we know is that he wrote a sequence of words which can give birth to constantly novel forms. There is no limit to the virtual forms embodied in a great text. Peter Brook, Autour de lespace vide
THE YEAR WHEN BROOK DIRECTED HIS FIRST PRODUCTION OF THE

Tempest, was a time of increasingly politicized theater in Europe. The rst ten-and-a-half years of the postWorld War II era brought with it the absorption into the modern dramatic canon of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and John Osborne. Mid-twentieth-century theater was sometimes a platform from which humanitys responses to postwar/ cold-war pressures, tensions, and alienation were considered and reected, and occasionally subverted and pulverized. Peter Brooks work during this period became both an artistic force within this movement and a theatrical representation of these tumultuous times. From 1945 to 1957 Brook worked on ten different Shakespeare projects for stage and screen. After 1957, the year in which he directed his rst production of The Tempest and also toured the revival of Titus Andronicus, ve years elapsed before Brook did another production of Shakespeare. While he kept busy with contemporary theatrical and cinematic projects, Brook was perhaps searching for ways of staging Shakespeare that were less tradi64
4: PETER BROOKS EXPERIMENT: THE 1968 TEMPEST
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tional and more confrontational and contemporary. The theatre of darkness found its rst Shakespearean form for Brook with the 1962 staging of King Lear. This staging was also Brooks nal stage collaboration with Paul Scoeld, who played Lear in the production. The production was inuenced by the theories of the Polish critic Jan Kott, whom Brook had met during the 1957 European tour of Titus Andronicus. In 1962 Brook read the French translation of Kotts essay King Lear or Endgame, which places Shakespeares king within an absurdist world. At this same time, Brook was developing his concept for a stage production of Lear, and Kotts image of a Beckettian universe, a world at once monochromatic, reductive, and bleak, helped Brook in his creation of a darkening scenographic metaphor for Lear. Heeding Kotts declaration that: the grotesque is more cruel than tragedy (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 103), Brook reduced King Lear to corroding facades and emblems . . . so, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them only to see into a void (Marowitz and Trussler, Theatre at Work, 133).1 Brooks King Lear emphasized theatrically the literal cruelty found in the text. The staging was marked by the use of bright focus, forcing the audience into glaring awareness of the plays inherent ferocity. Viewed under white-hot light, the theatricality of Lear was diffused and the plays torments were heightened. Emphasis upon the plays cruelty was then further underscored by the elimination of any mitigating civility. All indicators, gestures, or moments which showed compassion or any other moral or corrective behavior were cut; this King Lear had no place for Edmunds repentance over sentencing Lear and Cordelia to death. Nor were there any sympathetic servants ministering to Gloucester after the blinding. Instead, the houselights were brought up to full power for the intermission, while onstage two servants shoved and taunted Gloucester, nally leaving him to grope off alone, smelling his way to Dover (Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 172). Kotts inuence can also be seen in the productions underscoring of the Beckettian elements of tragicomedy and gloom. The incorporation of shoe business into Brooks Lear reected Waiting for Godot, but while such a stage effect was farcical in Godot, here it was pathetic:
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. . . Brooks production opens with court dignitaries putting their boots on. The boots are real, the gestures of the actors exact, there is nothing symbolic in them. Later, when frostbitten Lear returns from hunting, servants help him to take his boots off. Again here the gestures are exact and precise. Paul Scoeld rubs the sole of his benumbed foot. At the point in the play when Gloster [sic] meets the mad Lear, those two human wrecks know everything about themselves and the world. Gloster takes Lears boots off, hugs them to his breast and kisses them. What does he kiss? Perhaps the last memory of the world that was. (Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 298)
In his Lear Log, Marowitz discusses act 4, scene 6, the scene in which the blind Gloucester is led by his disguised son Edgar to a tragicomic leap from a fathomless chasm. Marowitz calls this scene as Beckettian as anything out of Molloy or Malone Dies; the scene . . . ridicules life, death, sanity, and illusion. This has been the germinal scene in Brooks production . . . and it has conditioned all the scenes with which it connects (Marowitz and Trussler, Theatre at Work, 13334). The scene is also a seminal element in the view of King Lear as an absurdist play, as is suggested in such works as Martin Esslins The Theatre of the Absurd and J. L. Styans The Dark Comedy. In addition to the Beckettian inuences, this production of King Lear recycled some of the scenic aspects of Brooks 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, and was also stimulated and affected by the theater of Brecht. Margaret Croyden notes that Brechtian performance often focuses upon a central metaphor:
. . . a throne, a rope, a wagon, a screen, a stool, a benchanything that will suggest the social ambiance and embody the metaphor of the playcan become a point of concentration . . . (Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, 253)
Croyden further observed that there was a Brecht-like ambience to Brooks King Lear set. The stage furnishings consisted of a rough bench and two chairs, thus creating a dark and grim stage picture. The storm scene employed a rusty, vibrating thunder sheet that was exposed from above the stage. This production of King Lear was a great popular and critical success. In 1964 it toured internationally, rst to Eastern Europe, and then to New York. Since Brooks initial production of The Tempest in 1957, Brooks reputation as an international di-
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rector had continued to grow. Although in 1962 he had become a part of a general artistic advising triumvirate for the Royal Shakespeare Company, sharing the title of Artistic Director with Peter Hall and Michel Saint-Denis, Brook was also increasingly working abroad, particularly in Paris. In 1958, Brook had taken a translation of his staging of Arthur Millers A View from the Bridge to Pariss Theatre Antoine. Billed as Vue du pont, the production featured an international cast, with Raf Vallone playing Eddie and Lila Kedrova in the role of Beatrice. This staging was followed in 1960 by Brooks direction of the premiere performance in Paris of Genets Le Balcon at Theatre de Gymnase. Roger Blin, later to direct his own stagings of Genet, played the Envoy in this production.2 In 1963, soon after the failed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of The Tempest on which Brook collaborated with Clifford Williams, Brook mounted two more French-lan guage productions at Pariss Theatre de lAthenee, translations of John Ardens Sergeant Musgraves Dance and Rolf Hochhuths The Representative.3 Brooks afnity with French theater was further underlined in 1964 when he directed an English-language staging of scenes from Jean Genets The Screens at Londons Donmar Rehearsal Rooms in Covent Garden. Amid this international work came the theatre of cruelty season, which Brook oversaw as part of his involvement with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1962, Londons Arts Theatre was taken over by the RSC for experimental and laboratory theater. The 196364 season consisted of Artauds The Spurt of Blood, scenes from Genets The Screens, collage versions of Shakespeare directed by Brook and Charles Marowitz, and nally Brooks production of Peter Weisss Marat/Sade. Brooks 1968 experiment with The Tempest evolved from those truncated variations upon Shakespearean themes. The theatre of cruelty season became the chief populizer of Artauds theatrical concepts in England and, after the RSC tour of Marat/Sade, in America as well. In its German text, Marat/ Sade was seen as a quasi-Brechtian, Marxist-driven, verbose historical epic (Trussler, Cambridge Illustrated History, 342). It was transformed by Brook into an exercise in Artaudian cruelty (ibid., 343). While voicing his own serious reservations about Brooks Marat/Sade, Marowitz, in his review of the production for the Village Voice, wrote:
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one must . . . say that despite its intellectual slitheriness, it manages to combine the best elements of the Brechtian and Artaudian the` atres. It tells its tale a la Brecht, with signs, slogans, and anti-illusory ` devices; at the same time, it plumbs its psychic interiors, a la Artaud, with wild bouts of violence and cruelty. (reprinted in Williams, Casebook, 71)
Marat/Sade kept Brook occupied through 1966, rst with the successful New York production, then with the lm adaptation of the play. Brook did no work for the stage in 1967; his only directing work was for the lm Tell Me Lies. After that relatively light work schedule, Brook began 1968 with a production of Ted Hughess adaptation of Senecas Oedipus, in which John Gielgud played Oedipus and Irene Worth, Jocasta. Upon completion of Oedipus, Brook began his work on his highly experimental, laboratory production of The Tempest.4 But 1968 was also to mark some sort of pinnacle in twentiethcentury unrest and youthful fury. In May of 1968, amid the violence and polarization of the Vietnam War, barely a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and three weeks before the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Brook began rehearsing an international company of actors in a deconstruction of The Tempest. The production was billed as an exercise. It was eventually performed ve times with a running time of a little over an hour without intermission. Although the original intention was for the production to be staged in Paris at the Theatre of Nations Festival, it suddenly had to be relocated to London, because the French student riots of May 1968 forced the cancellation of that festival. Student-worker protests, demonstrations, and strikes paralyzed France in 1968. The protests, a reection of political unrest and hard economic conditions, featured street agitation and guerrilla theater activities that accelerated both the process and its urgency. Organizations involved in such issues as international disarmament, amnesty for political prisoners, civil rights and antiapartheid movements utilized street performance as an integral part of their overall strategy. Civil disobedience, political demonstration, and guerrilla theater were all indicators of a culture that believed direct, confrontational political action could be successful in bringing about social unrest, ultimately resulting in social transformation.
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In his article The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, Craig Owens emphasized the signicance of this social unrest occurring at the opening of the postmodern period. Owens wrote:
That the hegemony of European civilization is drawing to a close is hardly a new perception; since the mid-1950s, at least, we have recognized the necessity of encountering different cultures by means other than the shock of domination and conquest. (57)
Written at the start of the modern age, at that point of introduction of European inuence upon other cultures, The Tempest is also a play about the exertion of cultural pressure. This power play is emblemized by Prosperos enslavement, forced reeducation, and suppression of Caliban. According to Owens, the year 1968 stands near the opening of a postmodern era characterized by a recognition of different cultures. In 1968, societies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States were in the throes of war, resistance, and rebellion over constraints placed upon cultural diversity. Would not a production of The Tempest in 1968 be forced to confront what Brook referred to as the journalistic abstractions which enveloped both the play and the times? Performed at a time when western society was under increasing scrutiny for its domination and conquest of other cultures, The Tempest could well be considered as discomting textual evidence of the pervasiveness of colonialism: a usurping Western aristocrat governing his unclaimed island domain by means of threat, coercion, and superior learning. The company of actors that Brook selected to engage in this exercise/experiment on themes from The Tempest was also intended to represent this interaction of different cultures and nations. Brooks company consisted of ve American actors from the experimental Open Theatre, nine English actors, most of whom had trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, seven French performers, selected from auditions, and Yoshi Oida from Japan, contacted through Jean-Louis Barrault. It was Barrault who sought a Japanese No trained actor to ll out this company (Hunt and Reeves, Peter Brook, 136; Oida, Actor Adrift, 3). Brooks rehearsal space in Paris was an ideal model for what was to become his future performance space in Paris. In 1974, the Bouffes du Nord theater would become the home of Brooks Cen-
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tre International de Cre ations The a trales, patterned after the Gobelins, the site used for the rst rehearsals for The Tempest exercise. The Gobelins, the French national tapestry factory, was a space more accustomed to the restoration of Louis XIV chairs than mirror exercises based upon the theatrical theories of Jerzy Grotowski. As Hunt and Reeves explain, this 1930s concrete structure
. . . came close to Brooks idea of an empty space, being some 150 feet long, forty feet wide and twenty-ve feet high. One of the actors called it a great barn. Scattered throughout, dividing the space into bays, were large scaffolding panels fteen feet high. Brook later had the canvas stripped off these so that the whole space became visible; they also provided a two tiered structure on which to work. (Peter Brook, 136)
A physical plan for Brooks Tempest experiment was thus devised, but his company had to travel across the English Channel before it could be rehearsed and worked into performable shape. In France in 1968 the relationship between theater and politics was pragmatic as well as theoretical. Theater was both a bargaining chip and a political issue within the French social exchange. Student activists began the cultural dialogue by demanding that theaters role within a changing political fabric undergo reexamination. Implicit was the demand that theater cease to be treated as a bourgeois commodity. Activists sought alternatives to what they perceived as establishment theaterthat is, theater in its traditional proscenium architecture, which, by its very design, enforced the formal separation of performer and spectator. Opposition was also voiced to the use of scripts, since such productions tended to be the product of the individual. Performance as a collective undertaking was preferred. Student radicals rejected what were perceived as tired and mundane theatrical conventions. With a nod to the Futurists of the early part of the century, they urged artistic return to a different series of theater conventionsstreet theater, circus and vaudeville, and commedia dellarte: pieces . . . perceived as making theater readily available to everyone . . . , and which . . . encouraged interaction among performers and audience (Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation, 407). There is an interesting corollary between this call to return to
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the Futurists and Dadaist visual art. David Williams observed that Brooks concept for the 1968 production of The Tempest was itself indebted to the Dadaists, the early twentieth-century group of experimentalists who symbolically dismantled clocks and then reassembled them to create entirely new objets (A Theatrical Casebook, 136). Disassembly with seemingly random reconstruction, a collage effect, became a highly signicant aspect of this production of The Tempest. The May Revolution in Paris in 1968 brought striking students into direct conict with Brooks Tempest experiment. As noted, Brooks group was assembled in Paris because of the support and cooperation of Jean-Louis Barrault, the director of the Odeon Theatre. Student-generated uprisings led to the collapse of the De Gaulle government, caused strikes that virtually closed off Paris, and, tangentially, made it impossible for Brooks company to remain and rehearse in Paris. The situation reached a crisis when Andre Malraux, the French Minister for Culture, dis missed Barrault as the Odeon companys producer. In an effort symbolic of their determination to co-opt theatrical production, the students began occupying Barraults state-subsidized Odeon Theatre de France. Although in sympathy with their action, Barrault asked the activists to regard the theater, now considered as their revolutionary headquarters, with respect and not damage the building or its contents, especially the companys costumes. To Malraux, this cautionary request by Barrault sounded like tacit approval of the students overall objectives. This contre temps led to Barraults dismissal as director of the Odeon. Brooks company became indirect victims of this development, and like the banished Italian commedia troops of seventeenthcentury Paris, they were forced into exile. The French members of this newly minted company chose to remain behind in Paris. The English-speaking members of the company and Yoshi Oida were left briey in limbo. Brooks company, homeless and without nancial support, returned to London. The Tempest project ultimately became a jointly funded venture of the British Arts Council and the Royal Shakespeare Company, with additional funding from about a half-dozen British and American theater managers and impresarios, including David Merrick. So, ironically, despite the aims and objectives of French political radicals to repurify theater and give it back to the people, experimental theater was to be created through the intervention, nancial co-
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operation, and management of the most bourgeois of western theater producers and institutions. Performances were rescheduled for the Roundhouse Theatre, a nineteenth-century railroad station. As its name implied, the Roundhouse was a huge, circular performance space with a giant rounded dome. Located in a working-class section of Camden in North London, the Roundhouse was the home of Arnold Weskers ill-fated theater group and was regarded as a vital venue in Englands new, burgeoning fringe theater scene. However, in 1968 it was more usually a site for art exhibits and rock-and-roll shows. Of greatest import to Brook, however, was the fact that the Roundhouse had the potential to be converted into the same kind of empty acting space that had proven so provocative at the Gobelins in Paris. Brook encircled the Roundhouse playing space with a white tent. The tent, along with the giant mobile pipe scaffolding (the stage lights were mounted above these scaffolds), was used by the company for gymnastics and acrobatics. In the center of the scaffolding was a circular dance oor, and a raised, wooden, T-shaped primary playing area. The stage picture was completed by some low Japanese-type wooden platforms of various dimensions, which protruded into the open space (Croyden, Peter Brooks Tempest, 125). The actors acrobatic movements, performed under a billowing white tent before an audience seated around a center ring, created a circuslike environment. Brook forced the audience into close interaction with the performers and the action. The movable scaffolds used for audience seating were wheeled into different positions by the company during the course of the performance. In doing this, the performers brought the audience into the drama, challenging them, almost daring them, to become more than mere spectators.5 With the audience sitting along all but one side of the T, the actors performed in a 270 degree arc of stage, oor, and scaffolding. Five musicians sitting parallel to the platforms played percussion and remained a visible element of the stage picture throughout the performance. As in King Lear, extremely bright houselights were kept on throughout most of the performance. During The Tempest experiment, the playing area was remade into various medieval theater-like performance locations. Further underscoring the productions connection to the English mystery play tradition, Brook gave these playing spaces evocative
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names, like The Garden of Delights, The Garden of Hell, and The Tower. Prosperos island became the Garden of Delights when the near-dead crew reawakened and discovered themselves in the brave new world. Yet when dark forces were unleashed upon the islands hostages, the space was quickly transformed into the Garden of Hell. In The Shifting Point, Brook wrote that the relationship between the theatrical event and the space in which it was to be performed are inseparable and disappear as soon as we begin to reconstruct the space (150). Along with the other elements that were to be explored, this Tempest became an experiment attempting to probe the relationship between the dynamics of the performance and the playing space that it occupied. The year 1968 also marked the nal curtailment of the powers of the Lord Chamberlain to censor and control controversial theater work. This power of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain had been in effect since the 1737 enactment of the Licensing Act. Not coincidentally then, 1968 marked the zenith in the development of theater laboratories and fringe theater companies within the United Kingdom. Such groups as the Arts Lab, Interaction, Freehold, the Open Space, the Pip Simmons Group, the People Show, the Portable Theatre, Welfare State, the Joint Stock Theatre Company, and Edinburghs Traverse Theatre Workshop reected the reactions of social upheaval and loosened governmental pressure upon theatrical presentation. These fringe companies, particularly the Traverse Theatre Workshop and the Joint Stock Company, performed within the context of collectivity, and attempted to link theater with the local community. Inuenced by Brecht, Meyerhold, and commedia dellarte, the U.K. alternative theater companies emphasized physicality and employed minimal and highly mobile scenery and props. In the process, these companies helped to move English theater away from its traditional dependence upon text and speech into a theatrical world marked by . . . experimental physicality . . . performance art as an alternative to literary, narrative theater; anti-establishment politics; and . . . the development of new plays and playwrights (Cornish and Ketels, General introduction, ix). Ritual, cartoonlike or machinelike characterizations, gymnastic physicality, and extensive use of contemporary music in the service of biting social narrative were employed and integrated into the work of these fringe theater companies, much as they
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would be utilized by Brook and his experimental Tempest company. Among these emerging theater companies, group-centered investigation of material was practiced to a greater degree than ever before. Actors worked directly with playwrights, directors, and designers in the creation and development of the performance piece. Theater was constructed from textual subversion, improvisation, and sociological research. Brooks production of The Tempest incorporated the passion, frenzy, and confusion of the companys direct involvement in the eras chaotic political atmosphere with elements of the street theater which had been employed against them in Paris. Also added into this eclectic admixture were the theories of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, whose works were by now enormously inuential. The Tempest of 1968, always considered to be a work in progress, evolved from theatrical exercises, improvisations, and experiments. In Peter Brook: Directors in Perspective, Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves describe the works components in terms which again remind one of David Williamss reference to Dadaist watchmaking and disassembly:
Brook meticulously took The Tempest apart. Every theme, every image, every action, every relationship (actual and potential) was explored: magic, comic, tragic, political, lyric, primitive. The shipwreck, the unholy conspiracy, the wedding, the ship of fools, the drowning man, the abysm of time, the two attempted murders, the Commonwealth, the golden age, the brave new world, love at rst sight, the garden of delights, the Seven Deadly Sins, the tower of Babelall were used as the basis for extended improvisations. (138)
Additionally, Brook explored Shakespeares Tempest sources: particularly ve commedia dellarte scenarios, including the echo and eating spaghetti scenes, as well as the Autos sacra mentales of Calderon (one of the productions collaborating directors, Vittorio Garcia, specialized in such material) (137).6 Despite its short run of but ve performances, and a paucity of critical commentary in the daily newspapers, this production of The Tempest was ultimately seen as a signicant link between the vocabulary of the eras experimental theater and the Shakespeare canon.7 Virtually every contemporary account of twentieth-century performances of The Tempest includes at least passing reference to it.
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The direction of Brooks work since The Tempest of 1957 pointed toward his attempt at subversion and pulverization of Shakespeares text. Furthermore, Brooks own dissatisfaction with his 1957 production (and his even greater frustration with his failed Clifford Williams collaboration of 1963) contributed to his direction of this Tempest experiment. It was the attempt to correct the failures of his own productions of the play, as well as the inadequacies of other productions, that motivated Brook in this endeavor. Brook mused over his difculty with the play, noting that the text, seemingly so rich with Shakespeares major themes, paled in performance. What was fertile ground for textual exploration did not translate onstage to a rewarding experience. However, this imperfection was also freeing. Brook came to regard the Tempest as ideal source material for experimentation, since the themes could be examined individually, without the fear of shattering a perfectly formed entity (Hunt and Reeves, Peter Brook, 13637). Hunt and Reevess analysis of Brooks motivation was corroborated and amplied by Margaret Croyden. After discussing The Tempest project with Brook during the London rehearsal period in June of 1968, Croyden wrote:
. . . most important, Brook hoped that by commingling foreign artists, he could achieve a synthesis of style relevant to our times, which could obviate the conventional passivity of bourgeois audiences. (Peter Brooks Tempest, 125).
The Tempests objectives began to multiply. Brook sought to transform the role of audience from voyeur into that of actively involved observer, focus the production on Jan Kotts existential interpretations of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, demystify and pulverize the power of Shakespeares text, and then, to rediscover ` and redirect its potency elsewhere within the mise en scene. In The Shifting Point Brook wrote about the Artaudian inuences which helped to dene this production, noting that Artauds cruelty could be considered an attempt to restore visceral impact to an increasingly formulaic and bloodless theater. His 1968 experiment, Brook said, used Artaud more as a point of departure than as a literal model. With specially written texts and exercises, the company sought to create intense, immediate, and dense theatrical expression (58). The investigation of
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immediacy, intensity, density, and the relationship between theater and sound began during the rehearsal process. The company was divided into small subgroups to work with a committee of guest directors. Brook worked on this production/exercise of The Tempest with Vittorio Garcia, Geoffrey Reeves, and, briey, Joseph Chaikin. Each of these codirectors worked with a small group of actors, with each guest director running his group through his own series of improvisations, exercises, and theater games. Yoshi Oida saw the nal product as a collage, with Brook serving as the nal arbiter of what was to be retained after observing all of these rehearsal permutations. Brooks role thus became, quite literally, that of overseer, gleaning and selecting from what had been accomplished in these exercises, and eventually creating the structure for the performance piece. Mirror exercises, most probably Joseph Chaikins contribution to the rehearsal process, became a vital part of the work the actors did in preparation for the staged performance. Eventually these rehearsal exercises were integrated into the framework for the performance. The mirror exercises began as a one-on-one discipline, gradually evolving into a group exercise with the entire company mirroring one individual. The process began with two actors facing each other, as though one was the mirror of the other; the mirror attempting to imitate every gesture of the other. When the two actors were able to accomplish this exchange, more actors were added, until a group of eight or twelve was collectively mirroring the action or the emotion. This ability to mirror and transform became both an essential component in the process of preparation for the work, and a vital element of the ultimate performance of the work itself. One articulation of the mirroring technique as group dynamic within the performance occurred after the enactment of the opening storm. The company from Milan was strewn about the playing space, asleep. Croyden described what followed:
The crew lands on the island half-dead and half-blind. Miranda and Ferdinand meet and fall in love. As innocents, they touch, look (part of the mirror exercise) and make love in the rocking position. This is homosexually mimicked and mocked by Caliban and Ariel, while other members of the cast in turn mirror Ariel and Caliban. The possibility that Ferdinand and Miranda themselves embody monster
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characteristics appears to be the implication here. (Lunatics, Lovers, 248).
The mirroring theme was used again when Gonzalo delivered the speech in which he described his image of a utopian government. The actor playing Gonzalo distanced himself from his character while commenting on his words by standing upon his head. Caliban later emulated this posture, perhaps indicating that dissembling was yet another quality that the savage had learned from the civilized man.8 Antonios usurpation of Prosperos dukedom was another particularly creative outgrowth of the productions use of mirroring. When Prospero recounted to Miranda the specics of his brothers ascension to his realm, Antonio began to mirror and parrot Prosperos speech until he nally usurped the speech, literally stealing his brothers words, as well as his dukedom. Eventually, Prospero fell silent while Antonio completed the speech by himself. As the lone non-Western performer involved in the staging, Yoshi Oida was the outsider among the participants in The Tempest experiment. His rather wide-eyed observations of the mirroring and improvisational games, which were such an integral part of the early rehearsal process, are particularly telling. This was his rst exposure to western theater, and Oida found the use of these mirrors, theater games, and improvisations a curious western theatrical innovation. He recalls the early rehearsal process of The Tempest, and the effect that these improvisations had upon himself, his colleagues, and the production.
Everyone was asked to close his or her eyes and discover the people nearby through touch. Then we were taken to another group to meet them. As well as using our hands to make contact, we used our voices. We would make small ah or oo sounds as we touched each other. Eventually we became silent, and then on a signal, we all opened our eyes. There were about twenty-ve of us sitting on the carpet together. It felt as if we had known each other for years, and yet we had communicated through our hands and voices. This conrmed, through direct experience, that it was possible to communicate without words, and this surprised us all. This communication was not actor-to-actor but human being-to-human being. (Actor Adrift, 89)
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Over the past three decades, Oida has remained a vital part of Brooks Centre International de Creations Theatrales company. He has served the ensemble as instructor as well as actor. (He also played Gonzalo in Brooks 1990 French-language production of The Tempest.) Oida sees the groundwork for Brooks future experimental/group-centered work in the rather rudimentary games and exercises which generated the 1968 Tempest experiment. An exercise created by Vittorio Garcia was of particular signicance to Oida. Garcia divided the actors into two groups; one, the passive group, were the boat passengers, asleep after the shipwreck. The second group, the active group, represented Ariels assistants, who tried gently to wake the others, exploring quiet, subtle forms of interaction. In another exercise, the passive group was told to be very sad; their active counterparts were assigned to lighten their spirits either by words or by touch. In his lm documentary of The Tempest project, Brook made the curious (and perhaps pejorative) pronouncement that the magic of The Tempest is made easier by an Asian (Japanese) actor playing Ariel.9 Brook contended that Oidas training in classical Japanese theater made him physically more capable of enacting the ethereal, magical sense of Ariels power. Brook said that those trained in western theater know how to bring violence into the theater, [but] we dont know how to bring magic. To an Oriental actor, the way was quite clear.10 Perhaps because of the cultural differences represented by Oida, his approach to Ariels character was different from that of other members of the company to their roles. Ariel . . . had no xed form, said Oida. Sometimes I turned into a bird, sometimes into the substance of air itself (Actor Adrift, 1617). Acting approaches varied; Oida suggests that the disparate exercises were the beginning of Brooks investigation into ways of exchanging Eastern and Western theatrical traditions. Sometimes the actors performed naturalistically; sometimes they used a broader, more stylized physicality reminiscent of Kabuki or the Peking Opera. For the actors playing the various lords, Geoffrey Reeves suggested the notion of the seven deadly sins. Each actor selected a sin and shaped his body accordingly, turning himself into a kind of metaphoric puppet. Margaret Croydens description of the productions opening moments noted the evolution of Reevess seven deadly sins exercise into usable performance material. As the audience entered,
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the performers, attired in rehearsal clothing, were in position facing the arriving spectators
. . . display(ing) their masks (made with their facial muscles) and correlative physicalizations. They accompany these with animal sounds, grunts, moans, howls, whispers, intonations, and gibberish attempts to nd a correspondence between the facial, the physical, and the vocal. The masks are those of the people aboard the ship, just prior to the tempest; they are meant to convey social strata as well as archetypes. (. . . the masks were derived from a study of the seven deadly sins. Later, someone suggested the actors study the seven deadly virtues so that they could assume the mask-on-top-ofmask, as people do in life . . .) While part of the group plays the passengers, others play the ship itself. (Lunatics, 247).
The production demanded the performers to be capable of transforming themselves into inanimate elementsincluding ethereal, inorganic elementsas well as the players of the text. Despite the productions dedication to its improvisational originsthe notion of creating a free-form variation upon themes from The TempestOida, in both his writings and in personal interview, has emphasized the traditional Japanese theatrical concept of the kata, the faithful copy of what has already been done. With such eventual locking in of the set parts of performance, despite nightly variances and the western actors proclivity for reacting to the moment, all productions eventually stabilize and become kata. Kata keeps an improvisational experiment like Brooks 1968 production of The Tempest from becoming a mere series of exercises and warm-ups. Still, the unstructured structure of the Tempest experiment caused problems for the more staid theater critics who viewed and wrote commentary about the work. Harold Hobson, for example, entitled his column Drama of the Unforeseeable. His review read in part:
The players sweep like a tidal wave across the oor, hurl themselves on it, roll about, whimper, chant liturgically, and make epileptic gestures . . . Out of the mass of writhing bodies, howls of pain, gibberings of incomprehensibility, and deformed lunatic smiles which he [Brook] and his colleagues have, presumably, organizedfor surely they cannot just happenone feels obscurely, but in the end, hopefully, that something might perhaps sometime, in some as yet unrealized con-
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nection, in a place not at the moment to be foreseen, actually emerge. (Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers, 247)
Confusion was doubtless abetted by the pulverization of The Tempests text. While The Tempest project still used English as its primary language, it employed only ten percent of Shakespeares text. The Tempest was staged to be an alternative, physical theater portrayal of the themes of the play.11 Perhaps in deference to its multicultural company of players, it was also an attempt to deal with the play as though it was being communicated in a foreign language. One signicant result of the companys experiments with sound and language was the productions repeated use of echoing for dramatic effect. During the performance, the ensemble accentuated, distorted, and echoed key words from speeches, the companys verbal equivalent to its visual use of mirroring. The ensemble also created the strange sounds within the exotic island. Throughout the production, lines were intoned; words were overstressed and used more for their sound than for their meaning. Words and lines were rarely spoken naturally or naturalistically in a search for a meaning. For example, Oida as Ariel spoke his Shakespearean lines in a mixture of English, Japanese, and guttural noises. During the performance, English, French, and Japanese were all spoken on stage, creating a strange sort of symphony (Oida, Actor Adrift, 22). To Christopher Innes, the way the production used language was symbolic of its interpretation of the themes of The Tempest:
. . . Brooks supercially . . . juxtaposing of speeches reduced to single lines, merging of characters and rearranging of sequences in The Tempest was designed to transform Shakespeares play into a mythic image of the primitive nature of man beneath the veneer of civilization. And the dialogue was either transformed into hieratic chantinglike the nal marriage sequence which was accompanied by elaborations on And my ending is despair / Unless it be released by prayeror showed language as an instrument of oppressionas in Prosperos attempt to control Caliban by teaching him single words related to identity, beginning with you/me and ending with slave/master . . . (Avant Garde Theatre, 136)
In the Tempest experiment, Brook eliminated the central importance of speech as carrier of meaning and explored physical-
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ity as an alternative means of conveying the texts signiers and signicance. He had previously addressed this issue of de-emphasizing the power of Shakespeares language and refocusing the emphasis to visual alternatives when he worked on the lm adaptation of his stage production of King Lear. Brook has made numerous attempts to explain (and defend) the liberating effect that working from such a deconstructive point of attack had upon the process of creating the Tempest experiment:
We had no sense of obligation to deliver The Tempest. Consequently we were free, we could do a Tempest in which nine-tenths of the text was inaudible, incomprehensible. This didnt worry us. People who reproached us with that were making a useless reproach. It would have meant many months of work before we could have recovered that same freedom and yet made every word and every line live completely. To do neither thing would have been a horrid half-way house where we would have had to become much stiffer and conventional to deliver the text, or we would have had to say To hell with the text. This is ruining our newly found freedom. Lets not endanger our freedom. Let the text look after itself. Both of which would have been rotten solutions if the aim had been to present Shakespeares play. The only good solution would have been to have gone on working month after month to the point where, in presenting the text, we could have found all the freedom there was in the exercises. (Brook, quoted by Hayman in Playback, 45)
Examples of this free-form approach to the text abound. The opening storm was a cacophony created by the stamping feet of the ensemble under the direction of Yoshi Oidas Ariel, dressed in a black kimono jacket and oor-length gray skirt. Ariel called forth the spirits and the storm with a babble of Japanese words, nonverbal sounds, and powerful No foot movements. As the ship wrecked crew moaned and the passengers keened in their lifeboats, the rest of the cast echoed key words. (Croyden, Lunatics, 247). Another example of the use of text as sound was Mirandas opening speech after witnessing the storm. This speech was performed like an incantation, the testimony of a witness to horror, as in Greek tragedy. Miranda spoke her lines without end stops. She physicalized her horror at the ships destruction by jumping, running, and climbing about the scaffolding, the runway, and by scaling the top of the circus tent which hung above the playing
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area. Her reading of the lines was delivered without meter, emphasizing the driving force beyond the symbolic word (Croyden, Lunatics, 24748). The scene dramatizing Calibans education by Prospero was perhaps the best indicator of the power of words and of language. Says Caliban: You taught me language, and my prot ont / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language! (1.2, 36264). In this productions interpretation, Prospero teaches Caliban the words food and love, to which Caliban immediately responds, smiling with a small childs delight in the sounds of these words. However, both Prospero and Caliban give the word love a menacing intonation. Prospero then teaches Caliban the words monster and slave. These words come angrily from Prospero, a comprehension of their meaning dawning on Caliban only after Prospero inicts pain upon him in a sadistic thumb wrestle. Caliban begins to understand Prosperos lesson in might making right and starts the process of playing the role of monster. He leaps to the scaffolding and walks the parallel ladder. He then encounters Miranda, lifts her up, and sexually assaults her. The scene suggests that if Caliban was indeed monster and slave, his mentor had assigned him these roles. If Prospero thought Caliban a monster, then Caliban would have to become one. This cynical approach to Calibans education was further underlined by the ironic commentary of the chorus:
[Caliban] is captured and imprisoned in the caves (openings between the platforms). The percussion, accompanied by atonal music, begins again. Ariel moans, Ah, ah, brave new world, the chorus moans (or mocks) how beauteous is man. Caliban escapes; the takeover of the island begins. (Croyden, Lunatics, 249)
Ariel halted the rape of Miranda, subduing Caliban with a magical touch to his back. Caliban and Sycorax then engaged in a wild orgyCaliban standing on his head, legs spread, as Sycorax simulated fellatio. Then they reversed positions. The others followed suit with other variations on oral and anal intercourse, eventually forming a giant pyramid on the scaffolding. Caliban was on top, Sycorax on the bottom, holding Ariel prisoner. Calibans mother, Sycorax, long dead in Shakespeares text, was an important player in this exercise/interpretation. She was also a witness
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to Calibans imprisonment. When Caliban retreated to his cave beneath the wooden T-shaped playing space, Sycorax was seen imprisoned in the porthole to the right of him, perhaps serving as testier and witness to Prosperos earlier usurpation of her island home. The companys sympathetic interpretation of Calibans motivations and plight became a vital part of the structure of the piece. In Brooks lm documentary, he raised the question: What is the theme of the monster about? In attempting to formulate a response, Brook turned to Freudian ambiguity (while at the same time perhaps indicating the crucial role of the actors contributions to the improvisations within the rehearsal process) when he suggests that the actor playing Caliban (Barry Stanton) is actually revealing his own monster. By structuring the production as an exercise that dramatized themes from The Tempest, Brook was free to eliminate Shakespeares adherence to its unity of time. Brooks Tempest did not take place within the texts proscribed four hours of an afternoon. Instead, this interpretation began upon Sycoraxs arrival after having been banished from Algiers, long before Prosperos embarkation for the island. Sycoraxs imprisonment of Ariel and the birth of Caliban were both graphically staged. To Croyden, Calibans birth was, in effect, the dramatic enactment of the birth of vice:12
Calibans mother Sycorax represents those evil and violent strains that rise from man regardless of his environment. The monstermother . . . expands her face and body to enormous proportionsa fantastic emblem of the grotesque. Running to the top of the platform, she stands there, like a female King Kong, her legs spread. Suddenly, she gives a horrendous yell. . . . Evil is born. (Lunatics, Lovers, 248)
Caliban pulled the bottom of his black T-shirt over his head and emerged from the loins of the crouching Sycorax, who also wore a black T-shirt. For Calibans delivery, Prospero appeared as midwife. Caliban was borna pudgy, bald, baby-faced child in blue jeans. This sympathetic, Caliban-as-victim interpretation could be seen as a continuation of Brooks Kott-inspired reading of Caliban from the failed 1963 coproduction, and was viewed by Alden and Virginia Vaughan in their cultural history of the role
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of Caliban as chart(ing) the way to new interpretations of Caliban. The role now represented power more than subjugation (Shakespeares Caliban, 191). For Brook, the audience was perhaps the single most important factor in The Tempest experiment. The production was designed to raise questions that would challenge the role of the audience and break down the barriers between spectator and player in the theatrical exchange. The program note to the Roundhouse performance attempted to delineate the role that the audience was expected to play:
To those who are invited to attend the open presentations of this work in progress it is important to make clear the nature of such an experimental session. Even laboratory work does not exist until it happens before a spectator. At a certain pointhowever it stands work must be exposed. The spectators interest, and thus his participation, is needed by the actors, but their aim is not to please or divert him. It is assumed that he comes to a workshop, not as he comes to a performance in a theater, but rather because he wants to be involved in exploring questions that are concerning the theater everywhere. The present project is intended to bring fragments of evidence and experience to bear on these questions. The questions are: What is a theater? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relationship between them all? What conditions serve this relationship best?
The audiences major opportunity to become part of the action within the Tempest experiment was provided during the masque/ marriage scene near the conclusion of the performance. Before the audience involved themselves as members of the wedding, however, they witnessed a shocking improvisation/variation upon the act 4, scene 1 attack upon Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban by divers Spirits, in shapes of dogs and hounds. In this production, however, it was Prospero who was attacked, hunted, and seized. Wheeled in on a hospital gurney, he was thrown to the oor and mounted by the dogs, who bit, sucked, and chewed him. With Caliban and Prospero locked in each others arms, the predominant image was of homosexual rape. After an outburst of loud, obscene noisesgulping, swallowing, fartingthe group lay still and exhausted on Prosperos stomach and genitals. Ariel broke the tension, bringing ribbons and other bright materials with which to bribe and subdue the dog pack. The group broke
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into game improvisations, the scene dissolving into Miranda and Ferdinands marriage ceremony, with the audience encouraged into participation. In Shakespeares text, the wedding scene unfolds as testimony to Prosperos omnipotence. In this exercise, however, it immediately follows an extremely harsh display of Prosperos vulnerability and human weakness. For the wedding scene, the audience gradually inched forward, attempting to get a better view of the ceremony. Then, tentatively, they began to transform into members of a wedding party milling about. Indeed, they began to look like late-arriving guests at a marriage feast, anxious to place themselves most strategically. Company members reached out to the audience, asking the spectators to dance. Many complied, briey becoming performers within the exercise. At these moments, that line between audience and company, which Brook was so interested in exposing and manipulating, became blurred. Mendelsohns Wedding March was hummed and kazooed by members of the company. Gradually this classic wedding music evolved into the humming of rock-and-roll. The masque took on the appearance of a 1960s happening, with audience and ensemble joined into a single happy throng. The ceremony then transformed into Catholic ritual as Ariel placed a wafer in Mirandas mouth. At the peak of the noise and confusion of the marriage ceremony, Prospero shouted out, I have forgotten the plot! There was great laughter, followed by a long pause. Finally, Prospero continued, adding . . . the foul conspiracy.
The double entendre refers to the actual play and to Calibans plot, which threatens Prosperos position. Each actor stops where he is, thinks a moment, and then someone begins the lines from The Tempest epilogue: And my ending is despair; another picks up, Unless I be relieved by prayer, a third, Which pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself frees all faults. (Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers, 24950).
At this point, Prospero slid down one of the steel scaffolds, which Hobson described as look[ing] like a steel crucixion. Prospero wrestled with Caliban while the words, my ending is despair were passed through the ensemble, a counterpoint to the earlier scene in which Prospero taught Caliban the power of language. This time, however, it was Caliban overpowering Pros-
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pero. The struggle ended with Prospero seated, Caliban hovering above him. In this wrestling match Caliban held the upper hand, bringing the play/exercise to a very different conclusion. Throughout the nal moments, Prospero and Caliban continued to wrestle, rolling amid the discarded clothing and ribbons cast off by the revelers at the masque. Calibans I am subject to a tyrant was reprised and echoed throughout the ensemble in varying rhythms and inections, mixing the sounds until the voices faded out. Only the echoes of . . . ending . . . despair . . . relieved . . . by prayer were heard in the distance. The lights remained on. The performance ended on this note of incompletion. (The lmed performance suggests that there were no curtain calls and little applause.) Instead, the audience and company gradually just drifted away. As the playing area was vacated, the metatheatrical and ephemeral nature of the event was heightened. It was difcult to tell who performed and who observed the performance. Brooks experiment concluded with the line between actor and spectator crossed, blurred, and obscured. This event was certainly not intended to be a production of Shakespeares play. Incompleteness, improvisation, experimentation, and exploration were parts of the performances process, structure, and execution. Ronald Bryden in The Observer stressed the metatheatricality of the piece. At the same time, he perceived the essence of what Brook and his company had set out to accomplish when he wrote:
Here was how a play looks to an actor: the private emotional scoring which he contributes to the orchestration of a dramatic text. One would give much to see the nal production of Tempest arrived at via such rehearsal. (Review of 1968 Tempest)
The Tempest experiment incorporated the improvisational exercises of the contemporary avant-garde theater to create a work that reected late-1960s passion, unrest, and excess. The projects main long-term contribution, however, was the profound effect it had upon Brooks subsequent work. Perhaps the nal, nished production arrived at via The Tempest rehearsal would be Brooks 1970 landmark Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. This production explored meaning in Shakespeares text by going beyond the limits provided by language, while still remaining faithful to Shake-
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speares text. Rening the skills developed as a result of The Tempest experiment, Brooks Dream sought theatrical and metatheatrical means of involving the audience with the action.13 A Midsummer Nights Dreams company was involved in intensive improvisational exercise work. Once again, Brook attempted to discover ways of performing Shakespeares text with the heightened physicality of acrobatics and gymnastics, while simultaneously creating a magical Shakespearean landscape from within the connes of an otherwise empty space. The Tempest project also affected both the work and process by which performance work was to be created at Brooks Paris-based Centre International de Creations Theatrales over the course of the next three decades. At the Centre, Brook was free to experiment. Liberated from the demands of commercial theater, Brook in Paris (using several of the actors who were a part of The Tempest project) continued to develop theatrical work through the process of research and improvisation. As Yoshi Oida observed, the improvisational work that had generated The Tempest project would eventually appear rudimentary, primitive, and even laughable in its navete. The Tempest project permanently altered Brooks perception of the role of the theatrical director. Gone were the days of productions when Brook perceived his role as that of autocrat who designed sets, composed music, and approached the rehearsal hall on the rst day with a completed promptbook. Brook had now entered a stage in his career where he saw his role as director as that of collaborator and adjudicator within a developmental and quasi-democratic theatrical process.
5
Giorgio Strehler, 1978
My profession is to tell stories to others. I have to tell them. I cant not tell them. I tell others stories to others. Or I tell my own stories to myself or to others. I tell them on a wooden stage, using other human beings, in the midst of objects and lights. If there were no wooden stage, I would tell them on the oor, in a piazza, in a street, at a corner, on a balcony, behind a window. If there were no other human beings with me, I would tell stories with pieces of wood, bits of cloth, snippets of paper, tin, anything in the world. If there were nothing, I would tell stories just by talking aloud; if I had no voice, I would talk with my ngers . . . I would tell stories any way I could, because the important thing to me is to tell things to others who listen. . . . I dont care about being understood. Its enough that people listen to me. Giorgio Strehler, in an interview in the New Yorker, 4 May 1992
GIORGIO STREHLER WAS AN UNKNOWN YOUNG DIRECTOR WHEN HE

staged The Tempest at the Boboli Gardens in Florence in June of 1948, his credits consisting largely of eight productions with the Piccolo Teatro in 1947 and 1948. Since the production of The Tempest was nearly unanimously hailed, it helped establish Strehler as a preeminent postwar Italian director and placed many of the companys younger cast members in the Italian theatrical spotlight. Several of them would be linked with the Piccolo Teatro for many years to come. Strehlers early development as a director brought about signicant changes in the Italian approach to stagecraft. Strehler had described prewar Italian theater as a time of the worst boulevard theatre. The era was marked by no dress rehearsals . . . no directors . . . only phony stars and fake prima donnas. It was in reaction to this kind of theater that the Piccolo Teatro was founded. 88
5: GIORGIO STREHLER, 1978
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Strehlers early work with Shakespeare helped to bring about change throughout Italian theater, and more specically, it signaled the beginning of a revival of Italian postwar stagings of Shakespeares plays.1 These productions involved gures that were to become signicant forces in the performing and visual arts of the second half of the twentieth century. For example, the Boboli Gardens were again used for a spectacular staging of Shakespeare in 1949, when Luchino Visconti directed Troilus and Cressida with a fantastical Troy designed by Franco Zefferelli. It was so lavish in spectacle and cast that it could afford to be staged for only six performances (Lane, Shakespeare in Italy, 307). In 1950, Visconti staged another elaborate Shakespeare production, this time in Rome. As You Like It, retitled Rosalinda, included sets and costumes designed by Salvador Dali. Visconti and Zefferelli eventually established their fame as directors of lm, but Giorgio Strehler remained committed to directing for the stage, returning to Shakespeare many times over the next thirty years. But his development into one of Europes foremost theatrical artists and visionaries did not occur in an Elizabethan vacuum. On the contrary, Strehlers work with Goldoni, Brecht, Pirandello, and grand opera informed his entire oeuvre, affecting all of his productions, including his work with Shakespeares plays. A survey of Strehlers prodigious performance history from the years 1948 to 1978 charts the path that led to his second investigation of The Tempest. Over that thirty-year period, Strehler directed 134 different productions of theater and opera, among them ten works of Shakespeare. The Tempest stands alone however, as the only play from the Shakespeare canon that Strehler ever restaged.2 Eclectic borrowing from a broad variety of theatrical sources was a key element in this early period in Strehlers direction of Shakespeare. In an interview with Ralph Berry for his book On Directing Shakespeare, Strehler said:
Eclecticism, be it understood, has positive or negative possibilities. Now, I see Shakespeare as a poet who surpasses the age in which he is enclosed, but at the same time bound to it. He is at once national, English, Elizabethan, and universal . . . for each of his works one must nd the precise ambience which is contained not in the stage directions, but in the lexicon of the piece itself. (12425)
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The precise ambience for the 1948 Tempest was epitomized in its masque scene, complete with Italian baroque music and dance adapted from the Scarlattis. For his 1951 outdoor production of Henry IV, Part 1, Strehler constructed an Elizabethan stage which was built within the large Roman amphitheater in Verona. Strehlers set combined van Buchells copy of De Witts sketch of the Swan Theatre with a romantic imagining of Shakespeares Globe (Orani, Italian Directors, 274). Strehler then put a Roman stamp upon the production by utilizing colorful sbandierata, the Sienese ag-wavers who have participated in that citys Palio festival since the Middle Ages. In much the same way that the music of Scarlatti and Alessandro contributed to the 1948 production of The Tempest, the sbandierata lent a tangible element of nationalism to this production that contributed greatly to its popularity with its Italian audience. Commedia dellarte was also an important element in Strehlers earliest Shakespeare productions; both the 1948 Tempest and his 1949 Taming of the Shrew incorporated the use of lazzi from commedia dellarte. Strehler would return many times throughout his career to the commedia tradition and to the commediabased plays of Carlo Goldoni. In a 1964 article in the Tulane Drama Review, Strehler and Grassi wrote of the role of the commedia tradition and its legacy within modern Italian stage work:
There is no commedia tradition. The commedia itself was a phenomenon of theatrical decadence, a unique and marvelous phenomenon: a moment when the actor, having no good texts, had to take the entire responsibility of the theatre upon himself. Current efforts to revive the commedia are articial. One can point to a certain rhetoric or style as a cultural fact, but one cannot revive it. The main legacy of the commedia in Italy is the tradition of the acting company as a separate social unit. Even today, the actor has no real place in Italian society. A malediction weighs him down; there are few Italian actors, and they live a segregated life. One can trace good things about Italian actorstheir power of invention, their embroidery upon a dramatic themeback to the commedia. The commedia no longer exists except as a tendency which, at times, is useful, but against which we often have to struggle in order to arrive at greater objectivity, at a critical interpretation of texts. (Grassi and Strehler, Sixteen Years, 3031)
However, in Strehlers work with the Piccolo Teatro, commedia became not merely an historic indicator but the principal means
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of connecting the comedic elements of Shakespeares plays to this rich Italian comedic resource. Use of commedia elements allowed Strehlers Italian actors to utilize their power of invention. Despite its theatrical decadence, commedia was perhaps the single most energizing and creative force of the Italian theatrical tradition, and, throughout his directorial career, remained a kind of theatrical lightning rod which Strehler could adapt and assimilate into the work of Shakespeare. Shakespeare contributed to this coadaptive process by necessitating stage roles for such commedia-grounded character types as the braggart soldier, the poetic lover, the pedantic blowhard, and the tricky servant. This theatrical adaptive circle can then be closed with the realization that all of these roles had their origins in Menander and the later Roman comedies. The commedia inuences within Strehlers productions were but one factor in developing a sense of ensemble within the Piccolo Teatro. Strehlers stagings were among the rst Italian stage productions where acceptance of the principles of the ensemble nally brought about an end to the mattatore era. Strehler further helped to end the age of the mattatore by developing his practice of directors theater. This expansion of the directors role was contrary to Italian theater practice which was a:
. . . cunning assimilation and combination of theatrical skills. The writer, the director, the actor . . . assume positions of comparable signifcance in a theatre which employs simultaneously all the available means of communication. (Hirst, Strehler, 37)
Strehlers directorial style was hardly so egalitarian as to allow for comparable signicance to the roles of actor, director, and playwright. While Strehler claimed to encourage the development of the theatrical ensemble, a production upon his stage evolved from a vision for the work that was almost totally the directors own. As personal evidence of this, in 1994, as part of my research for this project, I visited Milan and the Piccolo Teatro and had the opportunity to observe Strehler in action. At that time, the Piccolo Teatro was in rehearsal of a production of Pirandellos The Mountain Giants. To watch Strehler in rehearsal was to observe a director who acted out the entire production simultaneously with his actors. The noted French director Ariane Mnouchkine has observed that:
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There are directors, very great directors, who do everything. When you see someone like Strehler at work, he says everything, he does everything, he demonstrates everything, he ultimately takes the place of the actors. He uses actors because he cant play all the roles himself. If he could, he would do everything himself. He is a great actor. (quoted by Kiernander in Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil, 20)
Strehler conducted his rehearsals by repeating the lines with his actors and constantly xing the tone and the rhythm. Long before you realized where in the darkened theater Strehler was sitting, you were drawn to this deep, theatrical voice. At times this voice accompanied the actor who was attempting to deliver his lines. At other moments, Strehlers experience in directing opera, and his lifelong ambition to conduct a symphony orchestra were manifest as he conducted the performance of the actor insinuating nuance and body language. Richard Trousdell described the effect that Strehlers personality and process had upon those actors who worked for him. Trousdell likened Strehler to:
a monster/father lurking and listening in the dark. The performers must learn to overcome their fear of his presence, but they are never allowed to forget it. It is an inspiring, infuriating, and exhausting performance that seems to embody not just the life of the play in rehearsal but the very idea of theatre he is trying to realize. (Giorgio Strehler in Rehearsal, 68)
On one of my two evenings at Strehlers rehearsal, a stage right collection of actors was being called upon to produce a laughing aside. First, Strehler made the desired sound; then each of the actors, in turn, attempted to duplicate it. When each of them was able to replicate the sound, the ensemble was then ready for the next stepa company rehearsal of the laugh, with Strehler as lead laugher. Practice of this one brief moment went on for nearly twenty minutes, until the director was satised that his actors could provide the precise sound without his leadership. On other occasions, Strehler would turn from the stage, prowling the aisles, in a simultaneous performanceone seemingly for the benet of his audience of technical crew, staff, and spectators. When these methods proved ineffective in producing the desired effect, Strehler would vault onto the stage and demonstrate. In
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the midst of his line readings to his actors, he would also deal with sound and light cues. Although the opening performance of The Mountain Giants was more than a month away, all actors were already in full costume. Rehearsal was conducted with full light and sound crews in place. Thus, any alterations that he wished to make in the technical aspects of the production could be immediately incorporated. The theater was completely dark. (This was an approach that Strehler borrowed from Bertolt Brecht. Strehler explained it simply: in order to see whats happening onstage better.) All of Strehlers rehearsals were videotaped and monitored on television screens. Strehlers rehearsals began at four oclock in the afternoon and continued, without break, until midnight. His energy, his concentration, and his insinuation of himself into every moment of the rehearsal never agged. In a review of Strehlers biography Io, Strehler in 1986, Harvey Sachs described how Strehlers triangular equation of text-director-actor
. . . creates productions in which great individual freedom of expression is matched by extraordinarily rened ensemble execution, and in which earthiness and delicacy usually nd equalibrium. (Truth to the Text, 1132)
Sachss triangular equation was apparent in the rehearsal of The Mountain Giants. Although Strehler seemed to know exactly what this production was to look like, it was only when he saw all of the performance ingredients onstage before himthe actors in full costume, the props, the lighting, the set, and so onthat Strehler could then weave these variables around the text and afford himself the luxury of ne-tuning and experimentation.3 While rehearsal in Strehlers theater was no time for exploration by the actor, it certainly was a time for experimentation by the director, and an opportunity for him to leap upon any hint or suggestion offered by anyone within earshot. I nd signicance in Trousdells observation that: Strehler is always ready to improvise, to add new material, to loosen a moment that has gotten too set or to provide a surprising note of contrast to a passage that has become too obvious (Giorgio Strehler in Rehearsal, 73). Trousdells implication was that the improvisation, improvement, or contrast was always to be supplied by Strehlerit was not to be generated by his actors. They were expected to rehearse
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at, or near to, actual performance standards and conditions at all times, and to do this despite the distractions of Strehlers offstage performance and his demands for them to immediately adjust to his direction and cajolery. Added to this was the burden of rehearsing in front of a large audience. All of Strehlers rehearsals were openusually to groups of friends of the company, students, and theater professionals. Strehler explained his strategy: Alone in the dark, I feel less good if Im not surrounded by a little chorus, from whom I demand nothing but respect. Perhaps this explains Strehlers use of the same actors over and over again in his productions. Strehlers company had obviously grown accustomed to these working conditions and had enormous faith in Strehlers theatrical genius. On only one occasion did I observe an actor question or challenge Strehlers judgment. The actor was Andrea Jonasson, who is, perhaps not coincidentally, also Strehlers wife. As the Contessa in The Mountain Giants, Jonasson was preparing to deliver her dramatic death speech. Strehler was cueing the sound crew to provide musical background. Jonasson spoke up, pointing out that the audience would not be as familiar with this play, the legend around which the play was structured, nor this speech. She argued that the audience would need silence in order to comprehend the drama of this moment. Strehler thought the matter over briey, then capitulated, eliminating the musical underscore. The rehearsal of the scene proceeded smoothly. In 1952, Strehler staged a production of Macbeth, which, like the 1948 production of The Tempest, was performed upon multi` ple acting levels. The mise en scene for Strehlers Macbeth emphasized the dichotomy between the plays spirituality and its depravity. On the upper level were ghostly images, the victims of the plays injustices. These ghosts descended with raised tree limbs to represent the army of Birnam Wood. On the level beneath them, the plays horrible deeds were enacted. Each of the plays actions was heightened by Strehlers use of stage effects. The witches, for example, appeared apping their wings in a sickly green light (Battistini, Strehler, 80). Strehlers staging contributed to a sense of evils horrible inevitability. As one rose to power, he simultaneously descended to humanitys lowest depths. The image of mans inclination toward malice was carried through to the plays conclusion. When the noble Malcolm knelt
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to receive the crown, the stage light suddenly turned an ominous blood-red, suggesting that violence and corruption would eventually entrap this king as well. Strehlers 1956 production of Coriolanus indicated a change in his development as a director of Shakespeare. By that time, Strehler was seeking a more contemporary vocabulary. The 1948 Tempest or the 1951 Henry IV could perhaps be dismissed as prettied classical or historical spectacle, and Macbeth might be seen as an attempt to stage Shakespeare as a medieval morality play. The production of Coriolanus, however, showed that Strehler was now determined to stage Shakespeare by revealing the history and the contemporaneity of the plays. The selection of Coriolanus was, in itself, signicant. In the mid-fties, Coriolanus was not widely performed. Peter Halls important restaging of the work in London was still two years away, and the Berliner Ensemble production of Bertolt Brechts adaptation of the play was not to be produced until 1964. This paucity of contemporary stagings of Coriolanus caused Strehler to bemoan the lack of useful, contemporary criticism (Hirst, ` Strehler, 67). However, Strehlers mise en scene bore the unmistakable stamp of Brechts inuence upon his career. Strehlers production of Coriolanus came two years after his rst meeting with Brecht, and was, in David Hirsts words, a watershed in Strehlers directorial career, for he had found in the ethics and staging devices of epic theater a raison detre for his productions 4 (63). Strehlers epic theater staging of Coriolanus drew a parallel between Shakespeares century and postWorld War II/cold-war Europe. The playwrights themes of abuse of power and the consequences of such despotic authority were stressed for their timeliness. Each scene began with a sign projected upon a gray cyclorama, summarizing and sermonizing upon the subsequent action. The lighting was consistently bright, which along with Luciano Damianis elemental sets, removed all suggestions of illusion, and created an atmosphere of Brechtian didacticism. Strehler divided Coriolanus into two acts. The rst act was political in focus. In Per un teatro umano, Strehler described this section of the production as tragedy contained within a historical context. In the second act, Strehlers intention was to stage the play in order to reveal the characters common humanity (315).5 Hirst wrote that this structure did not resolve the plays contradictions, but rather exposed their complexity (68).
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Strehler used Brechtian staging devices again in his Henry VI plays, Il gioco dei potenti, a nine-hour epic.6 The Il gioco dei potenti production of 1965 returned to a different Brechtian model, the one that Strehler had established in his successful mounting of The Threepenny Opera in 1956, which had focused upon the entertainment value of the work. In the Henry VI plays, Brechts inuence was even greater, although the theatrical means by which Strehler expressed it was quite different (Hirst, Strehler, 71). There was an emphasis upon the excitement of feasts, fairs, battles, throne-rooms, executions, love, hate, vengeance, deceptions, apparitions, skulls, grave-diggers, and cannon shots (Battistini, Giorgio Strehler, 92). Il gioco dei potenti also stressed the dramatic variety found in these early chronicle plays in Shakespeares playwriting career. As Strehler gripped his audience with fanfare and spectacular stage effects, he simultaneously focused attention upon the plays dening stage metaphor warfare as a perverse and violent carnival. This was represented by three struggles for the throne, culminating in the dance of the youthful aspirants to the thronea tableau of powerful gestic force with Richard of Gloucester spotlit, sts clenched, as richly-dressed couples whirl(ed) past (Hirst, Strehler, 72).7 The staging of Il gioco dei potenti displayed Strehlers eclectic theatrical vision. Elements of medieval mansion staging effects were integrated with the modern trappings of Pirandello and Brecht. Il gioco dei potenti also bore evidence of Strehlers efforts as a director of opera. Although the production grabbed the audiences attention with its elaborately staged, high-pitched battle scenes and spectacles, the productions success came as a result of its slowing down of that pace, forcing the spectator to focus upon the plays basic element, mankind in the midst of intense hardship and tragedy. Great emphasis was placed upon the tragically contrasting battleeld scenes in which father kills son and son kills father. These mirrored stage moments were given poignancy by the underscoring of one mournful violin. As Strehlers career developed, the number of works he directed per year began to decline. From 1948 to 1957, Strehler averaged nine productions a year, virtually a production every six weeks. In 1958, Strehler directed only three works: Brechts Good Person of Setzuan, Pirandellos The Mountain Giants (the third time he directed this play), both done at the Piccolo Teatro, and Rotas opera A Florentine Straw Hat, at the Piccola Scala in
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Milan. After 1958, Strehler undertook no more than four projects a year. Nevertheless, Strehlers energy and vitality did not ag. Rather, Strehlers demands for more perfect lighting, costuming, and ensemble playing required more time and an increasingly higher budget. The Piccolo Teatros resultant nancial setbacks caused friction between Strehler and Grassi:
To say that Strehler demanded longer rehearsal periods and less frenetic performance schedules, while Grassi pointed to the balance sheet, is to oversimplify: Grassi cared as much as Strehler about artistic quality, and Strehler knew as well as Grassi that a theatre cannot exist without money. The nature of each mans responsibilities, however, led inevitably to dissensions along these lines. (Sachs, Proles, 53)
Strehler, as artistic director, found himself at odds with Strehler, the co-business manager of the Piccolo Teatro responsible for maintaining its nancial management. Rising costs of operation and decreasing public support contributed to the Piccolos decision to stage fewer new productions. The 1963 production of Brechts The Life of Galileo could well serve as metaphor for this bittersweet artistic period in the history of the Piccolo Teatro. It rehearsed for 123 days, not counting the long literary, historical, and staging preparations (Grassi and Strehler, Sixteen Years, 39). It was also during that long rehearsal period, however, that the Theatre Piccolo failed in its bid to replace its old and overcrowded theater space. Strehler began branching out, leaving the Piccolo more and more frequently, primarily to direct opera productions for La Scala. Until 1968, Grassi and Strehler had run the theater together, but Strehler then became uncertain about the future of public theater. Moreover, politics in Italy were mercurial and polarized. Since the Mussolini period, Strehler had been accustomed to being a target of the political right. In 1968, he suddenly came under attack from the New Left for his failure to incorporate experimentalism into his stage work. In the reection of such contemporary theatrical radicals as Grotowski and the Living Theatre, Strehlers theatrical vision was perceived by some as conventional and conservative. In July of 1968, he left his post as artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro.
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Soon thereafter, Strehler started his own troupe, the Gruppo Teatro e Azione, with the intention of founding the rst professional dramatic cooperative in Italy. Although its productions were critically praised, the Gruppo Teatro e Azione survived for only four years. In 1972, Strehler directed the company in a production of Brechts St. Joan of the Stockyards, which was a coproduction of Florences Maggio Musicale festival (which had also produced his 1948 Tempest) and the Piccolo Teatro. This cooperative effort created the opportunity for detente with Grassi and his old theatre company. Resolution was made easier by the fact that Grassi had just been named general manager of La Scala, and would be leaving his post with the Piccolo. Strehler returned to the Piccolo Teatro as its sole director. During this period of turmoil within the organization of the Piccolo Teatro, Strehlers international reputation continued to grow. In 1971, Strehler staged Verdis opera Simon Boccanegra for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The staging of Simon Boccanegra was, in many ways, an important step toward his mounting of King Lear, the production that was to herald Strehlers return to the Piccolo Teatro in the following year. Verdi wrote operas of Shakespeares Othello and Macbeth, as well as the character of Falstaff. But Verdi had also attempted to write a grand opera of King Lear, which he never completed. Instead, Simon Boccanegra became his surrogate Lear (Isotta, La Stampa, 12 November 1986). Like King Lear, Simon Boccanegra presents the tale of two old men who believe that they have lost their children and experience a painful pilgrimage towards understanding (Hirst, Strehler, 76). Both Simon Boccanegra and Lear conclude with the death of the hero after his rediscovery and reconciliation with a lost daughter. Strehlers staging for Simon Boccanegra underlined the eclecticism of his creative style. The opera was staged as if the events were a dream/nightmare, with many of the individual sequences staged in the mansion/location-specic style employed in the opening scenes of Il gioco dei potenti. Furthermore, in the gloom of nightmare-emptiness of Simon Boccanegra, Strehler discovered the appropriate metaphor for his staging of King Leara set upon a vast, empty stage, where, with the aid of a cyclorama consisting of plastic material, he could create a metaphysical circus. Strehler used T. S. Eliots The Waste Land as a literary refer-
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ence for King Lear. He also borrowed from Peter Brooks theory of the empty playing space and created a terrestrial planet, or a cosmic circus, where this event, at once very ancient and close to us, took place (Berry, On Directing Shakespeare, 124). Strehlers actors were dressed in slick, black leather costumes which, while referencing the Italian Renaissance, transposed the characters appearance into those of bizarre, contemporary motorcyclists. Lear, the King of France, the Duke of Burgandy, Gloucester, and the other royal gures wore long, leather theatrical robes. Lear and Gloucester were further singled out with clown makeup and paper crowns. These crowns of paper, or fools caps, blurred the distinction between the character of the Fool and the foolhardy fathers. Thus Lears metatheatrical observation that we are come to that great stage of fools (4.4.18081) resonated throughout the production. The central piece of Ezio Frigerios stage design was that transparent veil drawn across the stage like a Brechtian traverse curtain (Hirst, Strehler, 77), a tightly stretched tent . . . converted . . . into a circus arena (Orani, Italian Directors, 303). In the opening scene, after the King disowned Cordelia, Lear ripped through this veil, throwing its pieces to Goneril and Regan, who then ceremoniously folded it into a ag of honor.8 Strehlers staging was also inuenced by the performance history of King Lear. A long-held academic supposition is that Robert Armin, the leading clown actor of Shakespeares company, doubled the roles of the Fool and Cordelia. In Strehlers King Lear, a young actress, Ottavia Piccolo, played both parts. Metatheatrical elements dominated the staging. From the audience, Edmund the Bastard observed the opening scene of Lears love test of his daughters. He then vaulted onto the stage for an opening soliloquy. The Fool also maintained consistent contact with the audience. Actors served as stagehands, carrying on their simple props of platforms, stools, and pieces of wood. Conversely, in the scene when Lear appears at Gonerils home with his fty knights, the stagehands became actors. This production of King Lear was one of Strehlers great critical and popular successes. It toured Europe for the next six years, making stops in Paris, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Geneva, Zurich, Frankfort, Stuttgart, and Hamburg. After the completion of this European tour of King Lear, Strehler began work on his restag-
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ing of The Tempest. Like King Lear, this production was to use the plays metatheatricality as its most signicant element. Strehler saw Prosperos island as a stage set, and Prospero as a supremely theatrical entitypart magician, part dramatist, part director, part dissembler. Strehler seemed to be reconstructing The Tempest as a nal, theatrical summation of his own career. He acknowledged his strong identication with the character of Prospero:9
There is nothing fragile . . . about Prosperos power over nature. Prospero is a magician, an illusionist. Of course, I turned him into something between Shakespeare and Strehler. After all, from the beginning, he orchestrated the spectacle we are presenting. But at the end of the play, when he removes his magic cape with its cabalistic signs and puts on a simple shirt, he is simply one of us. The set is pulled down, allowing the audience to see the exposed masonry of the back wall and wooden substructure. Prospero leaves the stage to stand on the same level as the audience in the orchestra. It is as though Shakespeare wanted to say: Ive presented here the parable of human life. Now, its all up to you! Prospero, the master articer, is only human. (Strehler, in an interview with Lamont, Shakespeare with a Touch of Commedia dellArte)
Besides seeing the play as a parable of human life, Strehlers Tempest was colored by the time in which the production was conceived. When Strehler began his work on this production of The Tempest, Italy was in the midst of confusion and despair over the assassination of Aldo Moro, the political leader of Italys Christian Democratic party who was kidnapped by members of a leftwing terrorist group. Moros body was found in a car in the center of Rome in May of 1978. Thus, The Tempests themes of political usurpation, revolt, and calculated assassination had contemporary resonance. As Strehler observed: History arrived . . . inside the closed wall of a theatre (Our Work on The Tempest Is Over). Strehlers rst instinct, apparently, was to reveal the method behind his theatrical magic to his theater audience. According to Jan Kott, the Polish critic and scholar who spent much time in Milan during the rehearsal process in 1978:
Strehlers rst plan was to make the machine (the means by which the spectacular opening storm scene was to be executed) visible.
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Later he decided not to show it. Only at rehearsaland this was one of the most beautiful theatrical momentsdid I see for a eeting instant the boys and girls carrying the blue sea on their raised arms. (Prospero, or the Director, 135).
At the opening of the production, the fourth wall of the theater was opened bottom to top, rolling up like a giant garage door.10 A crew of eighteen stagehands dressed in black began to spread a blue cloth along the length of the stage area. When all was prepared, the stagehands moved to their offstage and below-stage positions, beginning to wave and unfurl the corners of the sheet. The material began to billow into a huge storm at sea. The lights darkened, the music began, the storm scene unfolded. A large sailing ship appeared at center stage, oundering dangerously. A brief blackout of the stage action followed during which the theatrical tricks which were being employed to provide the sound for the storm were made visible to the viewing audiencea member of the sound crew walked behind the footlights carrying large plastic shakers in each hand. The operator of the thunder machine was shown. The musicians, who manned the percussions and cymbals, as well as the musical conductor, were seen. In Brechtian fashion no effort was made to conceal the means by which this production was to achieve its theatrical and magical effects. When the lights came up once again, the deck of the ship was seen. Giant waves surrounded the panicked crew and its passengers, the royal embassies from Milan and Naples, all struggling to keep the ship aoat. The crew of the ship, dressed in slick, hooded raincoats, was hurtled from one side of the ship to the other by the wind. The King of Naples was in the water, surrounded by the blue waves. His crowned head and a lighted lamp in his outstretched left hand were all that were visible. The lighting suggested a chiaroscuro painting by Caravaggio. The ship broke up. Gonzalo held on to the mast with one hand, grasping a lighted lamp with the other. Flashes of lightning illuminated the stage; the thunder sheet and its operator were shown. The Master of the ship was holding on to the lines of the mainsail as he attempted to keep the ship upright. The stagehands held the thick ropes offstage to counter the weight of the Master of the ship. Once the storm subsided, Prospero was seen in a biblical pose Moses-likecalming the seas as an island formed around him
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in the shape of a at, raised square created in the middle of what was formerly the raging sea. A circular playing area was formed in the middle of this island/square. Mirandas terried voice was heard before she could be seen. Upon Prosperos command to Lend thy hand and pluck my magic garment from me (2.2.25 26), Miranda and Prospero folded the magic garment as if it were a ag of state. Miranda then packed the mantle into a drawer built into the upstage right portion of the island. There was great intimacy in the scene as Prospero told Miranda of her history.11 Once Miranda fell asleep (line 186), Prospero called upon Ariel to appear. She was airborne, executing a technically extraordinary high-wire performance.12 Ariel landed upon the outstretched hand of Prospero, performing various virtuoso swoops and dives, while Prospero became the delighted partner in this aerial demonstration. Ariel was dressed in a owing white Pierrot costume, with white body and facial makeup. This was a childlike Ariel, and Prospero treated her paternally, allowing her to leap into his arms. When Ariel asked: Is there more toil? (line 242), the visible harness and wires that were attached to Ariels back became an important part of the stage business. On Let me remember thee what thou hast promisd, Ariel began to tug on those lines which now became symbolic of her servitude to Prospero. Prospero then produced a wooden pole from the storage space into which Miranda had packed his mantle. He plunged it into the ground and withdrew a baton from the folds of his cloak, using it to control Ariel and remind her of his great power. Ariel was forced into a position directly behind this pole so that she was half-visible on each of its sides. Physically, she was dramatizing her fate under Sycoraxs domain as Prospero reminded her of this evil: cloven pine . . . into which she did conne thee (line 275). Prosperos voice rose in fury, just as it did when he recounted to Miranda his own banishment from Milan. Prospero produced Ariels nymph of the sea costume from the storage space. He pulled the pole up and replaced it in that same space before awakening Miranda. He then wrapped a thick leather strap around his arm in preparation for his initial confrontational scene with Caliban. As Prospero called for Caliban (What ho, slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou, speak! [line 312]), Prospero rubbed and scraped his hand upon the ground. Caliban emerged from another compart-
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ment/tunnel of the island/playing area. He was very black, naked, but for a thin, dark loincloth. His rst movements were like those of a spiderall sinewy arms, back, and legs. He sat cross-legged as he described how life had changed for him on the island once Prospero took command. When Prospero accused Caliban of seeking to violate the honour of my child (line 345), Prospero gripped his leather belt and threatened Caliban. Miranda stood at Prosperos shoulder echoing her fathers threats. Caliban rose to a standing position, glaring at his attackers. With his eyes blazing, Caliban resembled an ebony god. Rather than crawling back into his hole, assuming the appearance of a repellant creature, he struck a posture of great dignity before walking off to the far stage right side of the island. Ariels song (Come unto these yellow sands) was dramatized as her head emerged from the waves of the water, which again appeared downstage between the island and the audience. Ariel pulled Ferdinand from the water by means of a line of rope that she attached to Ferdinands left wrist. Prospero and Miranda were framed at the back of the island, their backs to the audience; Prospero orchestrated and directed the scene, controlling the precise moment when Miranda would rst see Ferdinand, who rolled onto the island from the water. He wore a white shirt with billowed sleeves and tight, silver trousers. Ariel recoiled the rope that she used to pull Ferdinand ashore, and then awakened him by making rooster sounds. By the time Ferdinand awakened, Ariel was back in the water, singing Full fadom ve. Only Ariels head was visible at the conclusion of the song, and she disappeared into the seaquickly reappearing on the island, dancing around Ferdinand. When Ferdinand drew his sword on Prospero (line 466), Ariel was at Ferdinands feet, physically restraining the tip of Ferdinands sword so that Ferdinand found it impossible to lift it from the ground. Ariel then buried the sword tip in the earth and magically weakened Ferdinand into submission to Prosperos will. At the end of the scene, Prospero exited to the stage left side of the island, with Miranda and Ferdinand following behind. Ariel collected the magic props and replaced them in the upstage right compartment. Ariel lifted up a conch, held it lovingly to her ear, and listened to the ocean for a long moment. She then replaced the conch on the beach, closed the prop box, and exited from the island stage left as the lights dimmed.
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The stage remained partially lit. The island rose to an extreme rake. Vegetation magically emerged from the surface of the island. The courtiers from Milan entered as travelers in two distinct groupings; upstage was a foursome consisting of Gonzalo, Alonzo, Adrian, and Francisco. Downstage were Sebastian and Antonio; the two groups separated by a circle of light sand. Gonzalo picked up and looked quizzically at Ariels conch. When Gonzalo spoke of his ideal kingdom (I th commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things . . . (2.1.145) he sat down in the center of the sand circle. In both dress and demeanor Gonzalo reected academic ridiculousness, reminiscent of the commedia character of il Dottorre. At the conclusion of his speech, Gonzalo returned to the upstage left location with Adrian, Alonzo, and Francisco. Ariels haunting music was heard, after which Ariel appeared at the top of the islands rake. She slid down the rake to the center of the circle and tossed sand at the upstage four who slowly fell asleep. This allowed Sebastian and Antonio to plot their conspiracy in secret.13 After overhearing the plot, Ariel somersaulted off the island. As Sebastian and Antonio drew their swords and approached the sleeping courtiers, Ariel hurriedly reappeared and froze their swords above them while singing an awakening alarm to Gonzalo, thus preventing the murder. Ariel remained in the background as all the sleepers awakened, rose slowly, and then walked off, in the opposite direction from their entrance. The group took measured steps, as though transxed. Ariel followed them, picking up their cloaks and collecting them into a pile. She then donned a large, dark cap, picked up the conch and placed it on top of the cloaks. The haunting music built as the courtiers and Ariel walked off. The light on the island changed, the vegetation disappeared, and the rake of the island shifted from stage left to stage right. Caliban entered from the right side hauling a huge log. He trailed a long black cape behind his nearly naked black body. A loud clap of thunder frightened him, and he dropped the log to run for cover, but he quickly reemerged bearing a long stick, broomlike at one end, and containing noisemaking bangles. Caliban danced and chanted, using his stick to draw a circle in the earth. He lowered his face to the ground and seemed to ingest the sand that he then applied to his face, thus creating a white mask. Offstage drumming became intense as he chanted. In this way
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Caliban physicalized that portion of the text which called for him to hiss himself into madness(2.2.14). Trinculo entered in a white commedia cap, white aring pantaloons, and a owing white blouse, trailing a red cape. He wore a half-mask over his eyes. When Trinculo saw Caliban for the rst time, the latter was curled up, lizardlike. Stephano entered in a navy cap with a long feather, and a dark cape worn to the side over a costume of black-and-white T-shirt beneath a white tunic. Like Trinculo, Stephano sported a half-mask. He was clearly drunk, boisterously singing a Neopolitan sea chanty. During their reunion, Stephano and Trinculo ignored Caliban, who knelt at their feet in awe. As Caliban swore his loyalty to Stephano and Trinculo, the scene reached a heightened state of drunken lunacy. The threesome danced off together, the light creating a silhouette of the characters as they exited. There was a suggestion of a rainbow glowing in the background just before the lights dimmed. The play halted for the interval. Act 3 began with the island once again on a level plane. Ferdinand emerged from Calibans hole, bare-chested and wearing billowing beige short pants. He carried logs for Prospero, dropping them down the hole. Miranda entered, and the two young people pledged their love. Prospero stood on the forestage, watching the lovers, his back to the audience. His asides (Poor worm, thou art infected! This visitation shows it. [line 32], also 3.1.7476) were spoken over his shoulder to the audience. When Ferdinand and Miranda joined hands vowing to wed (3.1.8790), Prospero separated them by tossing his wedding ring onto the stage. Miranda picked up the ring and exited hurriedly, (and now farewell / Till half an hour hence). Prospero directly addressed the audience for the closing lines of the scene. The island was once again raked, with its severe angle pointing upward stage left. The rst point of focus was upon the conch in the center of the island. Caliban hauled the butt of wine for Trinculo and Stephano who followed behind, kicking Caliban as if he were performing the role of slave in a bit of commedia lazzi. While their treatment of Caliban was comical, Calibans appearance was something else entirely. His facial makeup was now a halfmask. On one side Caliban was the black savage, but the other side of his face revealed shiny white outlines. Caliban thus appeared to be half-savage and half-white coconspirator with Trin-
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culo and Stephano, attempting to nd his place and his role within their society. The section where Ariel threw her voice to Stephano was also performed as commediacomplete with slapstick punches. This comic lazzo was offset by the sincerity of Calibans appeal for Trinculo and Stephanos assistance in the killing of Prospero. When Caliban offered Miranda to Trinculo as a reward for his cooperation, Caliban reacted with utter disgust to his own plan. He crawled to the stage left rake, extended his head over the top and retched, lying still for a long while. Ariel danced and sang, invisible to Trinculo and Stephano who were terried by the strange noises. Caliban assumed a prone position and tried to reassure Trinculo and Stephano, explaining that this was an island lled with strange noises. Caliban remained a serious gure while Trinculo and Stephano were still buffo commedia gures. Caliban rose to his feet, carrying the wine butt in one hand and brandishing his staff in the other. He led Stephano and Trinculo offstage right. Caliban danced as though enacting a tribal ceremonial rite; Trinculo and Stephano crawled behind as the scene concluded. The rake and the lighting of the island shifted once again. Worn out and fatigued, the King and the courtiers marched around the perimeter of the island. Prospero once again assumed his downstage position between the actors and the audience; it was from here that he orchestrated and directed the magical banquet scene. First came the billowing blue curtains, reprising the opening storm scene. From beneath a portion of these curtains appeared a large chest containing exotic shells and fruits. This rst movement of the banquet was accompanied by music conducted by Prospero. As the courtiers approached the chest, Prospero waved his right arm violently in the air, which was Ariels cue to appear as a black-costumed, ying Harpy. Ariels voice was frightening and witchlike. As the storm subsided, Prospero again gestured with his right arm, and Ariel ew off. Prospero continued to observe the scene, as the King of Milan, fraught with guilt, wandered off, followed by Gonzalo, Adrian, and Francisco. Sebastian and Alonzo challenged the Harpy, but only after Ariel had own off.14 The conspirators had their swords drawn as they ran off. In their haste to escape, the company from Milan left behind their cloaks, and King Alonzo his crown. Prosperos speech, Bravely the gure of this Harpy hast thou
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Performd, my Ariel, was recited only after the exit of the courtiers. Ariel returned to the island, dressed once again in her white Pierrot costume.15 After Prospero exited to visit Ferdinand, Ariel spent a long while collecting the cloaks and the crown. She replaced them in the upstage right below. (If Prospero was the director of this metatheatrical production of The Tempest, then Ariel was most certainly its highly efcient stage manager.) Once the island was cleared of all props, Ariel bounded offstage right, taking huge leaps. Prospero entered to begin act 4, scene 1. His demeanor was one of priestlike ritual solemnity, as it was immediately after the act 1 storm. He carried a lighted torch in one hand and a bushel of straws in the other, props for the exchange of vows. Miranda looked radiant in a glistening white veil. Prospero gave both the torch and the straws to Miranda, who then handed the straws to Ferdinand. Prospero then took back the torch, and at midstage with his back to the audience, he magically transformed the torch into another bushel of straws, which he returned to Miranda. (Perhaps all of this legerdemain was to give credence to Prosperos cautionary warning to Ferdinand that the strongest oaths are straws To th re in th blood.) Ferdinand and Miranda sat on either side of Prospero as he called for Ariel, whose head appeared from the water between audience and island. Ethereal masque music provided accompaniment to a billowing curtain-cloud. Miranda and Ferdinand lay on their backs, head to head, joining hands. Prospero was downstage right, serving once again as stage director. In the distance, Calibans tribal drumming was heard. This prompted Prospero to remember that foul conspiracy, the intrusion of Stephano and Trinculo into his plans for this day. Prospero became enraged; the cloud-curtain billowed and disappeared. Miranda and Ferdinand jumped to their feet and embraced. This indicates a signicant textual cut. The entire masque scene with Ceres, Juno, and Iris had been eliminated. From Prosperos line 59No tongue, all eyes, be silent! the text jumped to line 158, where Prospero said: Sir, I am vexd; Bear with my weakness . . . The text then reverted back to line 149 and our revels now are ended. After this speech, Ferdinand and Miranda exited. Prospero called upon Ariel to bring forth Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano. Prospero was gentle with Ariel, a dramatic counterpoint to his rage at Caliban. Ariel moved behind Prospero and
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readied the robes of Antonio, Alonzo, Sebastian, and others for the scene to follow with Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano. Caliban entered rst, looking savage in a bright red costume and white facial makeup. He led Trinculo and Stephano onstage wielding his own long staff (a counterpoint to Prosperos?). Trinculo and Stephano found the Milanese wardrobe that had been laid out for them by Ariel, and began to try on the regal robes. Stephano placed Alonzos crown on top of his comical cap.16 As this scene continued, the two commedia characters, Stephano and Trinculo, performed lazzi while Caliban seemed to be acting in another playgenuinely impassioned and maligned, trying to gain the cooperation of this ridiculous pair of fools. Caliban grew more and more furious, his anger a mirror of Prosperos, even to the breaking of his staff. Prospero again stood at midstage, observing and directing. On a signal from Prospero, Ariel ew down upon Stephano and Trinculo; Ariel was wearing a frightening dog mask as she drove Caliban and the two clowns offstage. Prospero quickly reappeared to praise Ariels performance. There was a smooth transition from act 4 into act 5 as Ariel appealed to Prosperos humanity, reminding him of his promise to grant her freedom. To accentuate this point, Ariel once again tugged upon her clearly visible y-line, using it as the representation of her enslavement. Prospero began: Ye elves of hills . . . He dropped his long staff to the ground. On But this rough magic I here abjure, Prospero withdrew his book from within the folds of his garment and placed his small baton within its pages.17 Sadly, Prospero dropped both book and baton to his side, before resuming his role as director of the scene. He then cued the musicians to commence playing for the entrance of the dazed courtiers from Milan. The prisoners were positioned in a freeze around the lip of the circle. Ariel then removed Prosperos long red gown, crown, and staff from the prop box and assisted Prospero into the gown. When fully attired, Prospero moved to the center of the circle, looking gentle and benign. Ariels freedom was moved from its position within the text; she was to remain onstage until all of the prisoners were released. Her freedom was to become the climax of the play. From his position at center stage, Prospero extended his gown. When he lowered it, Ferdinand and Miranda were revealed behind him playing chess.18 The boatswain was brought on, clutch-
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ing Ariels hand. Ariel, childlike and very excited, mimed the boatswains miraculous rediscovery of his ship. Trinculo and Stephano arrived next. When Caliban emerged, it was an echo of his rst appearance. He climbed onto the stage, insectlike, from his subterranean captivity. Caliban no longer wore his savage makeup but was once again a naked and brooding gure. Caliban stood glowering directly over Prosperos right shoulder listening to his masters this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine mea culpa. Upon emerging from his cavity, Caliban held his wooden spear in his right hand, and a steel sword in his left. He weighed the two objects, seeming to realize the futility of going into battle against a weapon of steel with one fashioned of wood. In disgust and resignation, he punched open the door to his dungeon and began his descent. He paused briey, poised over the entrance to his dungeon-home. Abruptly, Caliban then dropped from view. Deceived and abused, he chose to return to the isolation of his hovel/home. However, the door to his dungeon remained open above him.19 Once the stage was cleared of everyone but Prospero and Ariel, it was time for Ariels release. Throughout the production, the paternal relationship between Prospero and Ariel was far stronger than that of Prospero toward Miranda, making Ariels release more poignant. Ariel ew down from the heavens and fell into Prosperos arms in a bittersweet reprise of her act 1 entrance. She was like a lifeless puppet, looking helpless in Prosperos embrace. Upon the words Bravely, my diligence. You shall be free, Prospero disconnected the wire attached to Ariels back. Ariels face froze momentarily into what appeared to be a silent scream of fear. Gradually, she came to life and moved tentatively around Prospero who stood silently, watching. The full meaning of freedom began to dawn on Ariel. No longer would she be Prosperos implement but would now have to take sole responsibility for her decisions. Slowly, she inched her way off the island, climbing over the framework that represented the oceans waves. After bridging the last column, she briey paused at the apron of the stage. Ariel turned and waved back at Prospero, standing in the center of the island. Prospero responded with a reassuring wave. Then, with a silent expression of joy, Ariel looked out to the back of the house, seemingly in search of a path, a destination. Soon, she found it, and ran, at a merry gallop
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through the center aisle of the audience and out the back of the theater. The audience cheered and applauded.20 Prospero allowed the book in his hand to fall to the ground. He grasped his baton in both hands, and with a mighty effort, broke it in two. Upon that move, the stage collapsed behind him, his island falling into disarray. The theatrical world that had been created for the performance was now in complete disarray.21 Prospero removed his robes, revealing modern clothing beneath, a white collarless dress shirt, and beige pants. He stepped down from what had been the playing area; picking up the suit jacket and draping it over his arm, he recited his epilogue.22 Upon completion of the epilogue, Tino Carraro, the actor playing Prospero, bowed to the audience. He then turned upstage, and waved his hand. With this gesture, Prosperos magical power returned. There was a rumble of stage machinery. Magically, this ruined space was rebuilt, transformed once again into Prosperos island.23 The company reentered for their bows, Ariel running back down the center aisle to rejoin her colleagues in the company. Eighteen young people, dressed in light blue T-shirts emerged from the columns that represented the ocean. These were the operators of the theatrical magicProsperos, Ariels, and Strehlers metatheatrical agents. Giorgio Strehlers production of The Tempest was affected by Serlios treatise on sixteenth-century stage architecture, by the traditions of Italian commedia dellarte, epic and grand opera staging, and by the fact that as a young man Strehler had had the opportunity to observe Max Reinhardt direct a rehearsal of The Merchant of Venice in Venice in 1933. Added to these inuences is the reality that Giorgio Strehler was a director with a voluminous memory, extraordinary theatrical scholarship, and the boundless energy with which to incorporate all of these rival traditions into a unique example of metatheatrical eclecticism. One question concerning Strehlers production of The Tempest has been the degree of inuence of Polish critic Jan Kott and his book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott personally attended the 1978 Milan rehearsals and spent many hours in discussion with Strehler about text and interpretation.24 Kott later voiced strong reservations about the production in Prospero, or the Di-
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rector.25 Kott also made a terse observation about the difference in the personalities of Strehler and Peter Brook:
Brook always asks questions. Giorgio Strehler . . . also asks questions, but he answers them himself and at great length. Then he asks another question, but hes interested only in his own answers. Conversation with Brook is difcult: the other person does all the talking. Conversation with Strehler is impossible: he does all the talking. (The Memory of the Body, 62)
Strehler evidently had no problem borrowing details and suggestions from Kott, but his production of The Tempest was very much a work of his own design, imagination, and research. Kotts chapter on The Tempest in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, entitled Prosperos Staff, emphasized the issues of metatheatricality. Prosperos Staff discussed the mirroring of characters within the play, a technique that Hirst also elaborated upon in his discussion of Stephano and Trinculo wearing the borrowed robes of Antonio and Sebastian. In Prosperos Staff, Kott wrote:
Shakespearian dramas are constructed not on the principle of unity of action, but on the principle of analogy, comprising a double, treble, or quadruple plot, which repeats the same basic theme; they are a system of mirrors, as it were, both concave and convex, which reect, magnify and parody the same situation. . . . The same situation will be performed on the Shakespearian stage by kings, then repeated by lovers and aped by clowns. Or is it the kings who ape the clowns? . . . Caliban lost his realm, just as Prospero had lost his dukedom. Caliban was overthrown by Prospero, just as Prospero had been overthrown by Antonio. Even before the morality proper is performed, and Prosperos enemies undergo the trial of madness, two acts of feudal history have already been played out on the desert island. (24748)
Strehlers Tempest employed the multiple mirrors that Kott described. Ferdinand, toting his logs, doing Prosperos bidding, and lusting after Miranda, mirrored Caliban. Caliban, shackled in his subterranean dungeon, mirrored Ariel, chained to her ying harness. On other occasions, Caliban, with wooden staff and a profound sense of his islands mystery and magic, mirrored Prospero in his ability to control the elements. When Caliban rst met Stephano and Trinculo, Caliban remarked: These be ne things,
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and if they be not sprites . . . (2.2.116), a comical precursor to Mirandas later Oh, brave new world speech, and an indicator of the parallel sheltering/imprisonment which Caliban and Miranda shared upon this island. In Strehlers production, Prosperos relationship with Ariel reected and refracted his paternity of Miranda. Stephano and Trinculos conspiracy plot comically mirrored that of Sebastian and Antonio. As Hirst pointed out, this links the production of The Tempest to Strehlers work with Pirandello and its theme of theater within theater. Kott felt that Strehler betrayed this mirroring technique in his Tempest, by having Prospero return to the house in the Epilogue. In Prospero, or the Director, Kott wrote:
Shakespeares Prospero is a director of limited resources who never abuses his power. Ariel is used by him for most important tasks. Strehler is a director who never has enough of the spectacular. (120)
In that same article, Kott also wrote:

In the most profound reading of Shakespeares Tempest, life and theatre, two spectacles and two illusions, repeat and send back their reections, twice like two illusions. (122)
Kott believed that Strehlers alteration of this mirror created a surprising theatrical psychomachy, where a master-slave relationship is converted into a director-actor relationship, and where:
Strehler is . . . a prisoner of his imagination, of this theatre and of all the plays he has ever directed. (119)
This is an interesting accusation to make against the theatrical director, and one to which Strehler would have had to plead guilty. While his 1978 production of The Tempest did not attempt a reection of the social, economic, or political conditions of the 1970s, it most assuredly was a product of Strehlers theatrical past and informed by his experiencesreal, imaginary, and theatrical.
6
The No Tempest: Yukio Ninagawa, 1988
A single mirror will no longer sufce to reect our complex world. My production of The Tempest . . . can be likened to the crossing and intermingling reections of a shattered mirror. Yukio Ninagawa, quoted by Nobuo Miyashita in Ninagawa Yukio, Theatrical Pacesetter
THE JAPANESE THEATRICAL TRADITION SHARES ELEMENTS WITH ENglands. Both have a performance history that evolved from religious festivals where actors imitated ceremonial acts. The two cultures had similar traditions of rural festivals that included acrobatic dancing and circuslike spectacle. Jesters and masked dances were a part of both countries theatrical past. When acting companies were established in each country, those companies were also similar; all-male acting in which companies consisted of actors, a resident playwright, and boy actors, performing upon an unadorned stage. These companies were supported and protected by the patronage of powerful lords and performed in theatres which separated the aristocrats from the local commoners. Thematically, the plays of Shakespeare bear some marked resemblances to Kabuki theater. These commonalties are most recognizable in what Andrea J. Nouryeh calls the familial bonds, civil war, violence, bloodshed, betrayal, and vengeance which comes out of the struggles of feudal societies (Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 254). In Japanese theater, as in Shakespeares tragedies and histories, there is a focus upon historical and legendary gures, with the narrative placing equal emphasis upon epic accomplishment and tragic error, and with the natural world subject to the terrors of the supernatural. Unlike the Greek classical tradition, both the Shakespearean and Japanese theater favor the mixing of genres; tragic and comic scenes, barbaric and rened behaviors could exist within the same play. 113
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When Shakespeare was introduced to Japan in the last half of the nineteenth century in written translation and on the stage, the emphasis was upon these shared features, yet Shakespeare also had to be adapted to Japanese cultural and theatrical tradition. If Shakespeare was to be understood and made accessible to a Japanese audience, his plays needed to be Japanized, with his locales, characters, and action moved to the Far East. Thus, in Tsubouchi Shoyos early translations of Hamlet and Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Ophelia become Lady Yodogimi and Kagero. In the earliest stage production of Othello, mounted in 1903, the action was moved from Cyprus and Venice to Formosa and Tokyo.1 The 1870s marked the arrival in Japan of English and American scholars devoted to literary study. This group, which included Edward H. House, James Summers, William A. Houghton, and Lafcadio Hearn, nurtured and developed the rst inuential native Shakespeare scholars in Japan. The rst translations of Shakespeare, by Tozawa Masayasu and Asano Wasaburo, under Lafcadio Hearns guidance, were rendered in colloquial Japanese. Hearn saw parallels between Elizabethan England and the Meiji reign of the Japanese Emperor Mutsuhito (spanning the years 1867 to 1912). He wanted these parallels to be a featured part of Japanese translations of Shakespeare. Similarities between the Kabuki tradition, and the Shakespeare/Elizabethan theater tradition were recognized and embraced by the early translators and by the producers of Shakespeare upon the stage. The famines, peasant uprisings, and riots of the late feudal period were the subjects of raw domestic Kabuki dramas, which were called kizewamono (Brandon, Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, 150). These plays emphasized the corruption of a decaying society. Kizewamonos arrival coincided with Japans earliest work on Shakespeare, and its inuence was reected in 1868 in a production of Julius Caesar. The eminent Anglicist Yasunari Takahashi described the staging of this production of Caesar as Kabuki-style, and claimed that the production had a camouaged message of political protest, coming just after the Meiji Revolution of 1868 (Is Shakespeare Still Too English, 84). In the 1880s and 1890s, Kabuki underwent a process of absorption, revision, and evolution. This was a period that James R. Brandon calls the Exile of the Gods because of reform acts
6: THE NO TEMPEST: YUKIO NINAGAWA, 1988
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which denied the religious functions of No and Kabuki, reestab lishing them as aesthetic forms (Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, 153). During this time, the work of Munzaemon Chikamatsu (16531725), the most celebrated of Kabuki and Bunraku playwrights, was reestablished upon the stage, and his inuence was quickly absorbed into the Shakespeare productions of the period. Chikamatsus canon for the adult Kabuki companies, for whom he began writing in 1686, may be divided into two distinct groups: heroic or quasi-historical ve-act plays that presented episodes from the history chronicles of Japan, and domestic plays that painted a naturalistic picture of the lower and middle classes of contemporary Japanese society. Whereas his heroic plays dealt with feudal codes of honor, abounded in military pageantry, and featured intervention by supernatural spirits, Chikamatsus domestic plays were set in the earthy quarters of the courtesans and prostitutes of late-seventeenth-century Japan. As was the case in seventeenth-century London, the theaters, prostitutes, and coney-catchers, shared the same neighborhood. Thus, Chikamatsu, like Ben Jonson, had his domestic plays performed on a stage that reected that stages surroundings. Within the format of a few established conventions like the stage journey (michiyuki), musical accompaniment, and intermittent commentary from offstage, late-nineteenth-century reemphasis upon Chikamatsus innovations and borrowings succeeded in solidifying the dramatic forms of Kabuki and Bunraku, eventually affecting Japanese performance of Shakespeare. Japans early translations of Shakespeare were free adaptations, based upon a Shakespearean plot. Major details of plot, like the assassination, the casket scene, the ghost walking, or Lady Macbeth somnambulating were always included as part of these translations, but beyond that, a great deal of leeway for adaptation was the norm (Miyoshi, Japan, 397). Later, the presence and choice of vital Shakespearean moments could be attributed to one key source, Charles and Mary Lambs Tales from Shakespeare, rst published in England in 1807. Tales from Shakespeare was an enormously popular book in late-nineteenthcentury Japan, and its inuence on the way the Japanese perceived Shakespeare remained up to 1930, by which time there were at least one hundred different editions of the Lambs Tales in Japan. These brief prose-story versions of the stage plays written to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shake-
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speare (preface to Tales from Shakespeare, vii), emphasized the plot-turning devices within the plays, while usually ignoring the subplots, and all the while paraphrasing Shakespeares words. The Lambs version of The Tempest, for example, omitted the Stephano-Trinculo-Caliban foul conspiracy, and underplayed Calibans signicance within the play. Nevertheless, the Lambs Tales affected Japanese Shakespearean endeavors in both translation and performance, serving as ultimate arbiter of which scenes within the play were most signicant. Translation of Shakespeares plays was all in prose. Obviously, Japanese has become a more modern and exible language in the past one hundred years, but the language as it existed in the 1880s made precise translation of Shakespeare most difcult. One discussion of the early translators plight points out that one hundred years ago there were no Japanese words for fork and spoon. It has been only in the past fty years that Japanese translators like Fukuda Ko zon and Yushi Odashima and play wrights like Kinoshita Jungi and Fukuda Tsuneari have succeeded in adapting a style of modern and colloquial Shakespeare which have made the plays more accessible (Miyoshi, Japan, 397). Shakespeare performance history in Japan is usually traced from the production in 1885 of The Merchant of Venice. The play was adapted into a production which was titled Sakura-doki Kane-no Yononaka (The Season of Cherry Blossoms, The World of Money). It was set in Osaka during the Tokugawa period (late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century). Kabuki-trained actors performed The Merchant of Venice. Toyoda writes, Certain themes in the original such as the choice of three caskets and the forfeit of a pound of esh, are cleverly taken over, with some modications, but the version as a whole, when closely examined, is seen to be quite alien to Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Japan, 108). In 1901, the shinpa players performed a production of Julius Caesar in Tokyo. The shinpa movement (the new school) coincided with the arrival of Shakespeare in Japan in the 1880s and reached its peak of popularity from 1901 to 1904. Among the shinpas innovations were the introduction of women actors, a Westernized theatrical style, and the emergence of the theatrical entrepreneur. The impresarios within the shinpa movement built new theaters and attempted to cultivate a new theater audi-
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ence by introducing a heightened sense of topicality to the production of Shakespeare. For example, a month before the 1901 production of Caesar, Hoshi Toru, a Tokyo political boss, was as sassinated in Tokyos city hall. The shinpa production attempted to underscore the relevance of Julius Caesar in such a political climate.2 King Lear, adapted in 1902 by Takayasu Gekko, was Japans next signicant production of Shakespeare. Gekko used the title Darkness and Light, as suggested by Edward Dowden (1843 1923), an Irish biographer and scholar of Shakespeare, whose book, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, was widely translated. Dowden, like the equally inuential scholar F. J. Furnivall, believed that Shakespeares plays were accurate indications of Shakespeares moods and personal attitudes. Darkness and Light was performed in Kobe and Kyoto in 1902, and was revived a year later in Osaka, Yokohama, and Tokyo. Othello followed in 1903, as the next signicant Japanese production of Shakespeare. Kawasaki Otojiro produced Othello. Otojiro was one of Japans most important shinpa actor-impresa rios. Otojiro was husband to Sada Yacco, highly admired by Gor don Craig, and one of the rst signicant Japanese actresses. It was Yacco who played Desdemona in this production. Although it claimed to be an exact translation, this Othello was, more accurately, an adaptation. As noted above, Shakespeares settings of Venice and Cyprus were relocated to more familiar venues, becoming Tokyo and Formosa. The characters were similarly adapted, as the cast list indicates:
Muro Washiro, Governor-general of Formosa, of plebeian birth Count Fura Banjo, Minister of Finance Major Katsu Yoshio Lieutenant Iya Gozo Rotori Ko, Bank president Tomone Omiya Biwaka, a Geisha-girl Othello, the Moor Brabantio Cassio Iago Roderigo Desdemona Emilia Bianca
The production of Othello followed the established pattern of relocating Shakespeare to the Far East, while basing the plays structure upon the story as told in the Lambs Tales. Thus
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Othello contained most of Shakespeares plays signicant plot points. Yet, in adapting Shakespeare to Japan, the shinpa were also adapting the play to Japanese culture and tradition so that the productions ending was quite different from Shakespeares. Iago was killed, execution-style, by Cassios loyal followers. In his study, Shakespeare in Japan: An Historical Survey, Minoru Toyoda explained the revision:
This alteration was quite reasonable: a Japanese audience of those days expected a play to have a denite moral purpose, and would not have tolerated a disregard of obvious poetical justice. (110)
By 1906, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and the Henry IV plays were introduced upon the stage in Japan, with similar treatments (ibid.). Adaptation was thus seen as the solution to the problem of making Shakespeare understandable and accessible to the Japanese audience. The contributions of Akira Kurasawa on the screen, and Yukio Ninagawa on the stage in the second half of the twentieth century reect the inuence of these early productions. Ninety years after the production of Othello, Yukio Ninagawa noted: We have to pick up spiritual, emotional and visual elements in our theatre because there is nothing very interesting in the words (quoted in De Jongh, Noh Way Out, 116). In 1906, the Bungei Kyokai (the Literary and Dramatic Associ ation) was established. At its leadership from 1907 until its dissolution in 1913 was Tsubouchi Shoyo (18591935), a playwright, director, and the most important of Japanese Shakespeare scholars. He was the rst to translate the entire Shakespeare canon into Japanese. Upon completing his translations (from 1909 to 1928), he promptly began anew, rening the language, and limiting the emphasis of Dowdens annotations, which Shoyo came to believe had damaged his early translations. Among the innovations of the Bungei Kyokai was the forming of a research department, introduction of studies of modern theatrical practice . . . actors and actresses . . . trained in a style divorced from the old tradition (Toyoda, Shakespeare in Japan, 111). The 1911 revival of the Bungei Kyokai s 1907 production of Hamlet is considered the rst of Shakespeares plays to be done in its entirety in Japan. Toyoda cites this production of Hamlet with this curious caveat: the play was produced in its entirety,
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and, adaptations excepted, was the rst complete presentation of a Shakespearean play on the Japanese stage (ibid., emphasis is mine). Toyoda does not note which text of Hamlet was used as the basis for this staging, thus raising serious doubts as to the entirety of the production. Nevertheless, Takahashi points to this production of Hamlet as a turning point in Japans Shakespeare performance history, for it inaugurated the practice of staging Shakespeare in doublet and hose. The production installed Shakespeare as one of the foundation blocks of Western theater in Japan. This adoption of Western theatrical principles was called shingeki. Shingeki literally, means modern theater. It denoted two things: translations of Western plays performed by Japanese actors costumed in Western garb and employing such devices as blond wigs and articial noses in order to disguise the actors Asian features (a common practice in Japans productions of Western theater well into the 1970s), and modern Japanese plays by native playwrights concerning native issues, but written in the style of Western theater (Is Shakespeare Still Too English, 8485). The Bungei Kyokai remained popular until its dissolution in 1913. Over its last few years, the company lost ground to two competitive theater forms: the traditional Kabuki theater and a newer dramatic movement led by the Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theatre). Nevertheless the Bungei Kyokais introduction of shingeki was to affect Shakespeare production in Japan for the next half-century. As the new drama movement rose in popularity throughout Europe, creating a new repertory and new naturalistic production and staging standards, a similar phenomenon was taking shape in Japan. Jiyu Gekijo was formed by Osanai Kaoru and a noted Kabuki actor, Sadanji. Their productions of Ibsens John Gabriel Borkman, Hauptmanns Lonely Lives, and Gorkis Lower Depths attracted an audience of intellectuals, at the expense of the Bungei Kyokai. In order to compete for this audience, Shake speare needed to be seen as contemporary and as relevant as Ibsen, Gorki, Strindberg, Maetterlinck, and the rest of the new wave. In the 1920s there were still companies in Japan with an exclusively Shakespeare repertory. The Mumei Kai (the Club without a Name), was founded by former members of the Bungei Kyokai. Their productions were popular from 1920 to 1923, notably Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. All signicant productions of
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Shakespeare in Japan between 1906 and 1923 were performed by companies that could trace their origins back to the Bungei Kyo kai and to the tutelage of Dr. Tsubouchi Shoyo. This connection helps explain shingekis inuence on the performance of Shakespeare in Japan. By 1923, two other companies inuenced by Dr. Shoyo, Bungei Za (the Literary Theatre), and Kindai-geki Kyokai (the Modern Dramatic Society), were producing Shakespeare. While not exactly thriving, Shakespeare on the Japanese stage was surviving. The changing ways in which Shakespeare was produced in Japan could be further seen with the arrival of the Tsukiji Sho Gekijo, (the Tsukiji Little Theatre), in the mid-1920s. The Tsukiji Sho Gekijo responded to the competition of the Jiyu Gekijo by performing other western playwrights besides Shakespeare. This company is credited with further developing the shingeki new style of producing old plays, and moving away from the adaptations which marked the old Shakespearean tradition. The Tsukiji Sho Gekijo s 1928 production of A Midsummer Nights Dream was produced in collaboration with the New Symphonic Society, which played Felix Mendelssohns incidental music to A Midsummer Nights Dream. This production, with its western music and costuming, underscored the idea . . . that Japan still had much to learn from the superior western drama (Nouryeh, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 256). Western stage innovations and experiments were more and more widely absorbed into Japanese drama. The Chikyu Za (the Globe Company), was formed in the late 1920s, and adopted the modern-dress style of Englands Barry Jackson and his 1925 production of Hamlet and 1928 Macbeth. The increase in foreign residents in Japan led to the creation of dramatic associations like the Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Club founded in 1896, which took pride in the historical accuracy of its Shakespeare productions. Westernized staging was also seen in Japanese university productions of the Shakespeare canon. The English Literature Department of the Japan Womens University, from 1938 to 1940 produced Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest with all-female casts. As World War II approached, Japan was still adapting Shakespeare for the Japanese audience, but the Japanese theatrical traditions within these productions underwent a de-emphasis. Western inuence on costume, music, movement, and acting style
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was more noticeable; traditional Japanese theatrical inuences decreased. The productions became more self-conscious, suggesting a society concerned with how others perceived it. Less effort was expended toward making the plays accessible to the Japanese audience. No longer were productions drawn from the idiom of native performance custom and stage tradition. The productions of Shakespeare in this period attempted to portray Japan as a place not so very different from Europe and America. American occupation after World War II added still more Western inuence to performance, as Japan developed a fascination with the West, particularly with the United States. English-language productions of Shakespeare in Japan became common. The Kabuki and No inuences on the performance of Shakespeare in Japan were seen as having served another period and another purpose in Japans history. Moreover, during the period of the American occupation of Japan, from 1945 to 1951, No theater was banned, as an art imbued with nationalistic and militaristic spirit (Rodowicz, Rethinking Zeami, 97). Japanization was perceived as either jingoism or as an admission of some kind of inferiority; an inability to comprehend the genuine article. In a 1966 evaluation of Shakespeare on the Japanese stage, Professor Masao Miyoshi of the University of California at Berkeley assessed the situation as follows:
. . . despite the peculiarities and distortions [the Kabuki style of Shakespeare production] introduced into the plays, without it, there is little likelihood that Shakespeare would have been so readily accepted by the Japanese. It was only gradually, as a more knowledgeable audience came to appreciate a more authentic Shakespeare, that the Kabuki idiom and convention and, more specically, the severe limitation of its actors in the manner of speech modulation, were seen as problems intrinsic to the whole enterprise of Shakespeare in Japan, problems that perhaps only a more thoroughly bilingual culture will nally overcome. (Japan, 398)
It was not by means of bilingual acculturation that Japan would establish an innovative, creative, postwar Shakespeare performance vocabulary. Japans postwar Shakespeare would succeed when it once again sought out those common threads that linked Japan to Shakespeare initially. The postwar Japanese interpreters of Shakespeare, notably Akira Kurosawa on lm, and Yukio Ninagawa on stage, rened the performance of Shake-
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speare when they once again adapted Shakespeares canon to Japans own rich artistic tradition. Toward that end, Akira Kurosawas adaptation of Macbeth was to lead the way. It was now to be the Thane of Glamiss turn to be transformed into a samurai. Minoru Toyodas brief but invaluable 1940 history of Shakespeare in Japan concludes with the note that no Shakespearean lm has as yet been made by a Japanese company (Shakespeare in Japan, 117). The statement is ironic in view of the enormous international impact of Akira Kurosawas 1957 lm adaptation of Macbeth (called Throne of Blood).3 It was to be as a result of Kurosawas Macbeth that the attention of the world was drawn toward Japanese interpretation of Shakespeare. Kurosawa, like Ninagawa afterward, applied Japanese theatrical tradition, particularly No and Kabuki (and the Japanese plastic arts), to the adaptation and performance of Shakespeare. How to view Akira Kurosawas lm of Macbeth within the context of Shakespeare performance history has been a much-debated point. Peter Brook expressed his opinion in a 1966 interview with Geoffrey Reeves:
Kurosawas Throne of Blood . . . is a great masterpiece, perhaps the only true masterpiece [on lm] inspired by Shakespeare, but it cannot properly be considered Shakespeare because it doesnt use the text. (117).
J. Blumenthal wrote that Kurosawa relies on Shakespeare only as a scenarist whose vision is consonant with his own, and never as a maker of pentameter (Macbeth into Throne of Blood, 345). In view of the history of Shakespearean performance in Japan, this seems highly appropriate; Shakespeare had been employed as scenarist with little or no impact upon the dialogue of his plays from the moment that his canon was rst translated and performed onstage in Japan.4 Kurosawa reshaped the Macbeth legend so that it became a Japanese tale of ambition, guilt, and supernatural intervention. Native Japanese cultural and theatrical traditions were applied to the basic Shakespearean structure of character and plot. The Kurosawa lm of Macbeth borrowed traditional No ele ments, among them the white mask, which in No is often associ ated with ghosts and spirits. As Kurosawa explained in an
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interview with the Japanese lm critic and historian Tadeo Sato, he used the No mask as a means for actor preparation:
Drama in the West takes its character from the psychology of men or circumstances; the No is different. First of all, the No has the mask, and while staring at it, the actor becomes the man whom the mask represents. The performance also has a dened style, and in devoting himself to it faithfully, the actor becomes possessed. Therefore, I showed each of the players a photograph of the mask of the No which came closest to the respective role; I told him the mask was his own part. To Toshiro Mifune who played the part of Taketoki Washizu [Macbeth], I showed the mask named Heida. This was the mask of a warrior. In the scene in which Mifune is persuaded by his wife to kill his lord, he created for me just the same life-like expression as the mask did. To Isuzu Yamada who acted the role of Asaji [Lady Macbeth] I showed the mask named Shakumi. This was the mask of beauty no longer young, and represented the image of a woman about to go mad. The actress who wears this mask, when she gets angry, changes her mask for one the eyes of which are golden-colored. This mask represents the state of an unearthly feeling of tension, and Lady Macbeth assumes the same state. For the warrior who was murdered by Macbeth and later reappears as an apparition, I considered the mask of the apparition of a nobleman of the name of Chujo to be becoming. The witch in the wood was represented by the mask named Yamanba. (Mannvell, Akira Kurosawas Macbeth, 103)
Although Mifune played the Macbeth character of Washizu without a mask, Ana Laura Zambrano, in her article Throne of Blood: Kurosawas Macbeth, indicated the similarity between Washizus facial expression, indeed his very bearing, and that of a bust of Fudo Myoo, an incarnation of Buddha who was a popu lar deity in the ninth and tenth centuries, and a major inuence on the No mask. Fudo Myoos role was as guardian over the righ teous. He used his sword to defeat evil and offered his hand to assist the needy. The facial expressions of Fudo Myoo were widely used, not only in religious temple statuary, but also upon the No stage. Performers were trained to model their stage movements and attitudes after this heroic gure. It was Fudo Myoos expres sion of wrathful justice that was transferred to the character of Washisu (26667). The movements and attitudes of No actors were an important element in Throne of Blood. In his book The Films of Akira Kuro-
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sawa, Donald Richie quotes Kurosawa: I wanted to use the way that No actors have of moving their bodies, the way they have of walking, and the general composition which the No stage pro vides (Films of Akiro Kurosawa, 117). By its ritualistic nature and conventionalized performance vocabulary, No theater se verely limits movement, yet it can also be lightning quick and menacing. Kurosawa found this a most effective means of adapting Shakespeare:
People in general think the No is static. It is a misunderstanding. The No also involves terribly violent movements resembling those of an acrobat. They are so violent that we wonder how a man can manage to move so violently. The player capable of such an action performs it quietly, hiding the movements. Therefore both quietness and vehemence co-exist together. Speed means how fullled a certain period of time is. The No has speed in such a sense. (Kurosawa, in an inter view with Sato, quoted by Mannvell, Akiro Kurosawas Macbeth, 104)
No elements in Throne of Blood were present especially in the scenes involving Asajithe Lady Macbeth roleparticularly in those scenes in which she persuaded her husband to assassinate the lord, and in her tormented hand-washing scene. Richie described her as the most limited, the most conned, the most driven, the most evil (Films of Akiro Kurosawa, 117). The spareness of the dialogue in her scenes required her to communicate her menace through gesture and movement. Her face was painted white, suggesting the No mask, and her movements were heel-to toe, like those of the No actor. Kurosawa had trained as a painter before becoming a lm director. He acknowledged that his familiarity with the traditional pictures of Japan was another contributing factor to his conception of Macbeth. Kurosawa was particularly indebted to the picture scrolls of the Middle Ages, the musha-e (a form of early picture scrolls of battle scenes) and the yamato-e, that emphasized symbolism and stylization, . . . and stressed emotion and mood rather than reality (Zambrano, Throne of Blood, 264). These picture scrolls provided invaluable costuming details of the wartime society of thirteenth-century Japan.5 The artists of these medieval picture scrolls also developed a technique of separating episodes in the screens by ending a scene with a placid nature scene.
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This most cinematic of painterly techniques was readily applied by Kurosawa in Throne of Blood. He studied the traditional Japanese musha-e (Richie, Films of Akiro Kurosawa, 121), and concluded his scenes with views of pine trees swaying in the wind, or of the fog rising from the woods. Humanity was removed from the composition in these transition shots. Kurosawa explained this technique through his understanding of traditional Japanese art:
The composition of leaving a large area white and drawing persons and things only within a limited section of the space is peculiar to Japanese art. The inuence of such pictures goes deep with us, and comes out spontaneously in our arrangement of composition. (Mannvell, Akiro Kurosawas Macbeth, 104)
By following these same Japanese art traditions, Yukio Ninagawa, some twenty years later, created the performance vocabulary for his own interpretation of Shakespeare. Ninagawa would also borrow from the No, the Kabuki, and from the traditions of Japanese visual art. The son of a tailor, Yukio Ninagawa was raised in the rural Saitama region north of Tokyo. Failing to get into Tokyos University of Arts at age eighteen, in 1954 he applied instead to a drama school he saw advertised in the program of a Kobo Abe play. His rst major role came in 1961, when he was twenty-ve. He played the queen in Jarrys Ubu Roi in Tokyos Small Basement Theatre. In 1968, Ninagawa and sixteen friends set up the revolutionary Theatre of Contemporary People, which dedicated itself to new Japanese playwriting. The Theatre of Contemporary People performed in a movie theater because no traditional theatrical space would book them. The Theatre of Contemporary People was an immediate success, with Ninagawa becoming the companys leading actor. When Ninagawa created his own production of Macbeth in 1980, he conceived the production around the symbolic importance of the cherry blossom, which became the plays recurring image. In Japanese art tradition the fall of the cherry blossom is used to suggest the transience and brevity of life. At the same time, the owers of the cherry tree, with their heady beauty, have sinister associations with madness and deceit. In Ninagawas Macbeth the slow fall of cherry blossoms simultaneously
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framed, underscored, and diffused the horrors of the play. In this production, Macbeth met the witches under falling cherry blossoms while the three witches used arm gestures and body language to mime the swaying movement of the branches of the cherry tree. Macbeths kimono was dotted with cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms rained down from within his castle for most of Macbeths early soliloquies. Banquo was murdered under a veritable snowstorm of cherry blossoms. Birnam Wood consisted solely of cherry trees, and cherry blossoms fell again during the nal battle scenes, the cherry tree almost magically reappearing as Macbeth fought his last battle. Augmenting this recurrent visual image, Ninagawa created a variation upon the traditonal No performance space for another visual and dramatic framing device. He replaced the proscenium curtain with sliding panels. These screens of frosted glass were tended by two old women who sat upon the stage throughout, serving as actor/stagehands, responsible for the opening and closing of these panels. When closed, the sliding panels were used as scrims, allowing for evocative visual effects, as in the witches cave. These two old women served another important function in this production of Macbeth. In No theater the character of the waki often serves as the person on the side, the witness to the action. These two old women became expansions of the waki tradition. They wandered into the auditorium as the play began, shufing down the aisle as though they were latecomers in search of their seats. As the lights dimmed, they clambered onto the stage. They cooked meals, ate, drank tea, and commented upon the action. They also reacted strongly to the plays most tragic moments. They wept, rocking their bodies in anguish as they willed themselves to continue to watch the bloodletting upon the stage. Then, at the end of the play, as Malcolm spoke the plays concluding lines, they closed down the action by shutting the screens. The production mixed No elements with those of Kabuki and Kyogen, and Western critics and scholars found it difcult to agree on just which Japanese theater traditions were being referenced. Andrea Nouryeh saw many Kabuki elements, writing that the drunken Porter was enacted as a Kabuki comic servant. Nouryeh also considered the witches to be based upon Kabukis madwomen, and the pantomime horses ridden by Banquo and
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Macbeth to be similarly based upon Kabuki tradition. She also credited some of the gestural language of Ninagawas Macbeth to the Kabuki traditions of mie and aragoto (26364). Mie is a series of powerful gestures and poses originated by the seventeenth-century Kabuki actor-playwright Ichikawa Danjuro. These Kabuki movements are said to have been suggested by those same temple statues of the Buddhist deity Fudo Myoo that inuenced the No mask (Brandon, Cambridge Guide, 149) and in formed Kurosawas lm based on Macbeth. Nouryeh wrote that Ninagawas Macbeth recalled the mies stylized poses and gestures incorporating these into Danju ro s rough acting style (aragoto) of acrobatic, high kicks and ips, and the gleaming samurai blades . . . to evoke a real sense of danger in the stage ghts and battle scenes (Nouryeh, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 263). She also attributed to Kabuki inuence Ninagawas style of staging the action close to ground level. She claimed that the actors stances (their kneeling and crouching), was, in fact, assuming the posture of Kabuki actorstheir legs wide apart, and their knees bent. Similarly, Richard Hornby wrote Ninagawa . . . is known for the graceful way he mixes traditional Japanese, traditional Western, and modern avant-garde styles. He drew upon traditional No, Kabuki, and Kyogen theatre, but in ways that were always true to Shakespeare (Review of Ninagawas 1990 Macbeth, 107 8). Hornby saw the Porter to be in the tradition of the Kyogen comic theater where drunkenness is a stock joke. Hornby did not perceive the three witches as Kabuki characters, but instead saw them as ghosts from the No theatre, with stark white makeup and huge manes of hair (ibid., 108). Ninagawas Macbeth was the rst of the directors productions of Shakespeare to tour the west. It was hailed as the undoubted theatrical triumph of the 1985 Edinburgh Festival (Clifford, Edinburgh Stage 85, 22). It was also seen in Amsterdam that season, and then went to Londons Lyttleton Theatre in 1987. Macbeth was also performed as part of the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyns Academy of Music in October 1990. John Cliffords review stressed the power the Japanese acting tradition brought to interpreting Shakespeare onstage:
This total mastery of the physical space of the stage was the foundation for the wonderfully powerful performances from the actors
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themselves, who are also, of course, able to draw on a far richer theatrical tradition than our own. They are free, for instance, to use their full vocal range, free to employ a far wider vocabulary of physical movement, one not impoverished by the ridiculous connes of naturalism. The result was a revelation; a totally compelling theatrical event of a clarity, and power that utterly transcended all language barriers. Instead, they translated it all on to the stage with a literal faithfulness, an extraordinary skill, and a total trust in the text. (ibid., 22)
During his career of staging Western theater in Japan, Ninagawa has combined native Japanese theater traditions with such Western inuences as Brechtian theater (which is itself inspired by various Asian theatrical traditions) and the music of Western modern classical composers like Gabriel Faure and Samuel Barber, as well as other, even more contemporary forms of Western music. Ninagawa describes his amalgamation process: I get up and listen to Bach on my compact disc and have Japanese rice for breakfast (De Jongh, Noh Way Out, 116). Thus, culturally and physically, Yukio Ninagawa feels he is feasting upon both Eastern and Western sources.6 Ninagawas production of Medea, which was performed in New Yorks outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1986, borrowed from both No and Kabuki. It featured an all-male company in ornate, aring Kabuki costumes, which the critic Giles Gordon likened to intercultural sculpture: medieval Rodins, Epsteins or Frinks, sumptuously coloured up (Review of Ninagawas 1987 Macbeth, 18). The setting was simple palace walls and doors. The chorus played Japanese stringed instruments as part of a score which blended Eastern and Western musical forms. This chorus of sixteen framed the action, amalgamating Greek and No theat rical tradition. They moved and danced with balletic precision, swooping and soaring like birds, acting both with unity and as sixteen individually drawn characters. Again borrowing from the convention of the waki in No theater, Ninagawas chorus served as observers, actively listening without distracting from the actions of the protagonists. Mel Gussow noted that they looked like massed winged creatures, watching horried, as Medea acts out their darkest fears. When Medea speaks, the chorus remains motionless, as Mr. Ninagawa artfully parallels dialogue and silence, movement and stasis (Review of Medea, C3). The murder
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of the children and Medeas subsequent ight were staged with chilling theatricality. In order to perform the bloody deed, Medea stripped down to a red, body-clinging garment.7 She then exited from the stage through the palace doors, sword aloft, entering the house to murder her children. Her revenge exacted, Medea soared skyward on a dragon-drawn gilded chariot, moving above the stage, the chariot mounted atop a pneumatic lift. The play ended with Jasons discovery of Medeas treachery. From the palace entrance, he screamed with pain and anger, as Medea simultaneously howled her revenge from forty feet above. The kimonoclad chorus snaked its way around the stage as the crane lifted Medea higher and higher. The stage went to black. Ninagawa claims that his generations education in theater (he was born in 1936), was Western, perhaps accounting for his eclectic theatrical vision. They did not teach me anything traditional. We all looked towards Western theatrical techniques. When I decided to be a theatre director, I began to learn about traditional Japanese theatre and tried to get back to it (De Jongh, Noh Way Out, 116). The fashion in Western drama in Tokyo in the late 1960s was still based upon the tradition of the shingeki. That is to say, new European plays were produced, and by employing wigs and putty noses, Japanese actors posed as Westerners. The Theatre of Contemporary People reacted against this exaltation of things Western, and dedicated itself instead to new Japanese playwriting. In 1969, as Tokyo, like Paris, New York, and other world capitals, was embroiled in student strikes and militant activism, Ninagawa directed his rst productions with the company. The Theatre of Contemporary People rapidly became both celebrated and notorious. Although the plays had curiously insubstantial titles like Hearty but Flippant, and Fickle, Frivolous, and Sincere, the productions contained bite and political energy. At the nale of one production the actors entered the auditorium dressed as riot police. The audience was convinced that the police had come to arrest them, and, as the curtain came down, they attacked the actors. Ninagawa remained with the Contemporary Theatre Company for six years, establishing himself as a young director with imagination and a air for showmanship. By 1974, a mainstream Japanese producer, Tadeo Nakane of the Toho Company, recognized his showmanship and talent. Despite the Toho Companys power
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as an entertainment conglomerate, Nakane was fearful that his companys productions, particularly of Shakespeare, were unimaginative, conventional, and sentimental. He encouraged Ninagawa to apply his experimental approach and to bring some life into the staging of Western classics. Ninagawas rst production for the Toho Company was Romeo and Juliet, performed at Tokyos Nissei Theatre in 1974. Ninagawa sought not merely to bring life to a classic; he attempted to do so at breakneck speed. In just a few days, Romeo and Juliet fall in love, marry and die. This play is a whirlwind. I wanted to show just how fast youth speeds by (Miyashita, Ninagawa Yukio, 404). Romeo and Juliet were portrayed as contemporary Japanese lovers of ordinary backgrounds. Their musical themes were provided by British rock star Elton John. Romeo and Juliet became a great success, and Ninagawas residence with Toho and his partnership with Nakane became permanent. Just as signicant as the partnership with Nakane was Ninagawas growing attachment to Western classical theater. Over the past three decades, Ninagawa has directed six Shakespeare productions: Romeo and Juliet (1974), King Lear (1975), Hamlet (1978), Macbeth (1980), The Tempest (1988), and A Midsummer Nights Dream (1995), as well as Oedipus Rex (1976), Medea (1978), The Three Sisters (1990), A Streetcar Named Desire (1991), and Peer Gynt (1992). Like Giorgio Strehler and Peter Brook, he has also directed opera; in 1992, he worked with Seiji Ozawa on a production of Richard Wagners The Flying Dutchman. Ninagawas entrance into the world of grand opera is understandable. From the beginning of his directorial career, his ability to move large numbers of actors about onstage and create exciting visual images from these human tableaux has been among his greatest theatrical accomplishments. Ninagawa sees this management and direction of crowd scenes as an ability to bring order and chaos into some kind of fusion:
Modern theatre has been a theatre of intellectual understanding. In the process of becoming so, it discarded all that cannot be grasped with the mind. I wanted to salvage what had been discardedthe chaos. I brought great crowds of actors on stage as a method of presenting the irrational, of presenting pure physicality in its totality. (Miyashita, Ninagawa Yukio, 404)
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In Ninagawas classical work, particularly after Macbeth, the importance of the framing device within the structure of the production has been crucial. Like his theatrical ancestors who introduced Shakespeare to Japan more than a hundred years ago, Ninagawa feels that the Japanese audience needs an entry point in order for Western theater to be accessible. In Peer Gynt, for example, he began his production with the twenty-one-year-old protagonist playing a computer game that hurled him backward in time into Ibsens nineteenth-century, mythic Norway. In The Three Sisters, Ninagawa framed the play as a rehearsal for a Japanese theater company production of the play. Perhaps Ninagawas greatest strength as stage director is his visual artistry as a scenic writer. In Directors Theatre David Bradby and David Williams dene scenic writers as directors whose productions stress color, sound, movement, and gesture. In productions directed by scenic writers, the dynamics of performance styles, musical choices, and visual design become as important to the production as the text itself (247). In all of his productions, Ninagawa controls the selection of these production elements. Such authority would seem to be the one of the magnets that has attracted scenic writers to The Tempest, creating the opportunity for the theatrical director to emulate Prosperos onstage magic. Prosperos attempt to bring all elements under his control is mirrored in the directors attempt to do the same. When Ninagawas production of The Tempest was hailed by the critics as an overwhelming success, Ninagawa said: Perhaps the reason that it came off is that I put myself into Prospero (Billington, Noh Way, 25). To Ninagawa, putting himself into Prospero was the same as putting himself into The Tempest. Perhaps this explains Ninagawas determination to produce The Tempest in the guise of a rehearsal, and to literally place the director (who would also play the role of Prospero) upon the stage throughout the performance. By this means, the audiences attention was then constantly drawn to the plays director (and to its direction). The program for Yukio Ninagawas production of The Tempest titled the staging both as The Tempest by William Shakespeare and as Ninagawas The Tempest: A Rehearsal of a No play on the Island of Sado. This second title accentuates two distinctive features about this production. First, it emphasizes the impor-
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tance of the director. Ninagawa wanted to be viewed as creator of the piece, deserving of equal billing with the playwright. Second, the title stressed the importance of the metatheatrical conceit; this production was to be perceived as a rehearsal, ephemeral and changeable, a work in progress performed under the watchful eye of its director. At 6:45 the house was opened. The company (including Ninagawa) casually milled about the stage; one actor enacted a Japanese businessman with a shopping bag lled with his afternoons purchases. The Director of this No theater company was to be come Prospero, but even at this point, the relationship between this actor playing the part of the Director, and Ninagawa, the director, was intentionally ambiguous; both were dressed in allblack clothing. The Director/Prospero sipped from a white styrofoam cup, but this was not yet his show; it was Ninagawas, seated in a chair downstage left. Eventually, the Director would assume this position, observing those rehearsal scenes in which Prospero did not appear. Ninagawa, in modern black silk shirt and black trousers, smiled and greeted the throng onstage. Stagehands made nal adjustments; ladders were positioned in front of the hut/house. Suddenly the Japanese businessman became a whirl of activity. He removed his shirt, tie, and jacket, becoming a member of the acting company, in a hurry to complete his preparations for performance. Ninagawa left the stage, not to be seen again until his curtain call at the plays conclusion. The Director moved to the hut/stage, picked up his arrow/wand and waved it ceremonially around the center playing area. The crowd of people onstage began to thin out. The focus was upon the Director, who circled the stage area, checking the details of the set one last time, before the rehearsal was to start. As he paced about the stage, he began to move more deliberately, like an actor. He was assuming the character of Prospero. Gradually, the line between Director and Prospero blurred and disappeared. By 7:00, the house began to ll. Music was heard from the offstage right synthesizer, played by the actor who would later play Trinculo. The ladder and the lights were moved and adjusted. There were more techies (also dressed in black) than actors on stage. At 7:08 the drumming that had for a time been one background noise among many, began in earnest. The Director was seated in his offstage place, downstage left. A group of dancers began to perform at center stage. The Director watched atten-
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tively as the hut/stage area was swept. Seemingly late-arriving company members ran in their haste to catch up with those already milling about onstage. The conceit that this was to be a rehearsal was made clearer as actors in the company stopped to have a word with the Director before wandering away. Some of them ceremonially bowed to him. After about fteen minutes, the Director left the stage, and a four-legged dragon dancer appeared. The Director soon reappeared in his Prospero costumea long black robe, but with his Directors black coat showing underneath. His gray hair was tied into a long ponytail. The Director again picked up his Prospero arrow/wand. The dragon dance rehearsal ended and the entire company circled the Director who was in the middle of the hut/ stage acting area. He held his arrow/wand out and waved it around the circumference of the playing space.8 There followed a whispered moment in which the Director spoke to the company. The upstage cyclorama, behind the set, bounced with reected light. The Tempest began. The tempest was accomplished by many hands from both sides of the stage waving a huge quilted blue blanket representing the sea six times, causing it to billow from stage left to stage right. Prosperos fury and magic were behind all of this activity as he danced in the hut circle until the storm subsided. While the storm raged, Ariel swung from a rope above the ship, consisting of a piece of wood representing the prow of a ship. The ship rocked precariously, the party from Milan swaying and cursing the elements beneath the music. Once the storm subsided, the ship front was quickly removed, as was the group from Milan. The hut/stage was established as Prosperos cave. Miranda, in a white balletlength dress, watched the storm unfold. The fog blew in as she observed the action from the branch of a tree, her al fresco theater. The action was metatheatrically framed by two tall pine trees standing like proscenium verticals on each side of the stage. Prospero continued to use his arrow/wand to perform his magic, but he also used it to gesture and to conduct the musicians. Sound was orchestrated through Prospero and played by a group of percussionists seated upstage left. Stagehands lled in the spaces behind them. The percussion (whistle, blocks, drums) was accented with the haunting sounds of this magical island (clicks, warbles, and chants) produced vocally by members of the company.
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The Prospero-Miranda scene was distanced rather than intimate, but they embraced near the end of Prosperos tale of their arrival upon the island. With a wave of Prosperos wand, Miranda fell asleep, the back wall of the hut/stage closed, and Ariel danced out in gossamer white. Percussion and vocal chanting accentuated Ariels appearance. A guitarist came downstage right and played in front of the taiko drummer. When the scene ended, Ariel danced off, and the curtain on the back wall of the hut/stage glittered. Caliban emerged from the stairs beneath the hut, in a red, blue, and black dragon wig. On his long, shlike body were red, yellow, and lavender ribbons. He wore red and black platform shoes. His makeup was accented with green on his cheeks and chin, but his lips were bright red. Curiously, Mirandas fear of Caliban registered, not when her rape was mentioned, but moments later when Caliban threatened Prospero (The red plague rid you . . .). It was then that Miranda cowered at the back hut wall. Guitar chords punctuated Calibans exit. The tension of what was to follow was heightened by the lighting effects, which pulled focus to the strange vegetation hanging from the roof, creating a mysterious landscape. When Ariel appeared upon the roof, the actors ringing the stage again sang and chanted as vocal percussion. Ariel began his fairy song, but Ferdinands entrance abruptly interrupted it. Ferdinand rst appeared as did Caliban, upon his knees. He stopped in the middle of the hut/stage area. He was dressed in a white shirt with black leather trousers and boots and carried a sword. At rst Miranda did not see him. There was a stream of blue light from above. When Ferdinand challenged Prospero and moved forward menacingly, the latter froze him in a web of white strands. Miranda pleaded with her father on Ferdinands behalf (O dear father, / Make not too rash a trial of him, for / Hes gentle, and not fearful). The percussion accentuated her gestures. Prospero clapped his hands, and the scene shifted to where the captives from Milan slept. The lights upon the hut/house dimmed as the Alonzo scene began. In order to situate the scene as a different location, small pots of shrubbery were placed around the sleeping prisoners. The Milanese noblemen were clothed in western business attire beneath robes of red and purple. Ariel again appeared on his rooftop magical world, overhearing the plot of the conspirators and sprinkling his sleeping dust below. Ariel, in purple over his white robe,
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wore a mask, which froze a placid expression upon his face. He sang in a sweet, childlike soprano voice. From his offstage vantage point as director of this rehearsal, Prospero was privy to the plot being hatched by Antonio and Sebastian. He did not react, but read along with his copy of the promptbook. With a clap of the Directors hands, the scene ended. On the Directors second clap, hinges from the side of Prosperos cave were removed, revealing Calibans lair. Stephano appeared, looking like a puppet-doll with a different face mask on the back of his head. While this scene was played, the actors from the previous scene reappeared and quietly sat on the fringes of the hut/stage area, near the Director, watching as this next rehearsal scene unfolded. Caliban entered to the percussion of the taiko drummer. Trinculo appeared, wearing an apron over the white diaper/thong of a Sumo wrestler. The Director observed all from his offstage directors chair, still reading from his promptbook. Caliban was playful and lovable, childlike and ingenuous. He was charmed by Stepano and Trinculo. The scene was accented throughout by offstage taiko drumming. Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo exited dancing. The Director clapped his hands and the entrance to Prosperos cave was replaced at center stage. Ferdinand came on bearing his log. The background water shimmered white. As he talked of his impressions of Miranda and Prospero (O, she is ten times more gentle than her father is crabbed), he glared at the Director, observing the scene from his offstage seat. Occasionally the Director would cue the musicians who sat in a semicircle just upstage right of him. The second clown scene followed, with Ariel lurking above Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban. Ariel threw his voice to Trinculo, thus infuriating Caliban. The last scene before the interval was the banquet scene, where lighting effects created a golden hue. The musical accompaniment added to the magical quality of the lighting and the staging. The six members of the party from Milan were surrounded by six gures wearing black shrouds and black wigs. The six captives awakened, to see six white shrouded specters in pig masks. Each of the six specters carried a shiny, black urn, which was placed before each of the prisoners. The white gures moved downstage and danced a stately ritual dance while the men cowered in fear. Eventually the men were drawn into the dance with
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the white gures. The imprisoned men moved haltingly, as if under a spell. The slow-motion dance brought the men onto the hut/stage where they froze. The white specters danced off slowly to stage left, while the black gures formed a semicircle behind Prospero. Several black-clad stagehands removed the urns.9 Ariel wore a owing, diaphanous black robe and looked down on the frozen men from his position on the hut/roof. He then reanimated the men beneath him; they promptly drew their swords, incurring Ariels fury (You fools! I and my fellows are ministers of Fate). Cymbals, whistles, and drums accentuated Ariels gestures. The black-wigged specters reappeared behind the men, freezing them anew. To a heavy drumroll, the specters moved from the playing area, seating themselves by the Directors chair. Prospero then unfroze his captives, who turned their backs to the audience and sat in the stage left hut area. Prospero praised Ariels work (Bravely the gure of this harpy hast thou performed, my Ariel). The Director acknowledged for the rst time that there was an audience watching this rehearsal by the way he dismissed the company for the break between acts. He waved his wand/arrow, rst at the theater audience, then at his company of actors encircling him. As they left the stage, he waved the wand around the acting circle, just as he did before the rehearsal. He exited stage right, deep in thought. The last ve minutes of the interval were staged much like the last ve minutes of the preshow. The Director chatted with Ariel, using his wand/arrow as cane and walking stick. The company huddled around the playing circle. The Director waved his wand over the area, and act 4, scene 1 began. Prospero instructed Ferdinand on commitment (The strongest oaths are straws to th re i the blood), leading into the masque scene. No tongue! All eyes! Be silent! driving Miranda and Ferdinand onto the tree perch from where Miranda had also witnessed the shipwreck. Prospero stood in the center of the stage and directed the masque scene, cueing the entrances by means of his wand and body language. Vocal and percussion sound effects were added from offstage. Iris appeared in a kimono of purple, red, green, blue, and white. She wore a headdress and mask, and carried a golden fan. A rainbow of light beamed across the stage behind her. She moved across the deck of the hut/house, entering from stage left, and crossing to center stage; her entrance was stately and formal, as though she were part of a great procession. She
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danced with her fan, accompanied by an offstage song chant. When Iris reached center stage, Ceres entered in a peach and white kimono, with gold headdress. The rainbow beams continued to ash across the stage. A taped-off stage choir began. Prospero remained clearly in view, watching the progress of the masque and its impact upon Miranda and Ferdinand. During the entrance of Juno, accentuated by the sound of a whistle, and the swelling voice of the choir, the back wall of the hut/house was revealed. The image in the discovery space, an Elizabethan device, was converted here into a representation from Japanese art traditon. A wedding ceremony was enacted. A bride dressed in white was seated, opposite her young man in black kimono. Prospero had previously joined Miranda and Ferdinand as an observer from offstage left, but at this point he was drawn back into the action. Three gures dressed as geishas, in lavender and turquoise kimonos and wearing masks, joined the masque. They halted when they reached the end of the hut/stage just upstage of the central playing area. The reapers, wearing straw tunics and hats, joined them, their faces covered by gross, half-masks. The reapers were the commedia gures of this masque. They came down to the center playing area, forming a tableau. The taiko drum accented this section of the scene. The geishas came down the steps accompanied by the bride and Iris. The drumming increased in intensity and passion, as the dancing began. The reapers, the geishas, Iris, Ceres, and the bride came to the central playing area and danced. Juno danced from the hut/stage. A brilliant white, green, and magenta light covered the stage. At the peak of movement and energy Prospero remembered the foul conspiracy. He became enraged, ran to the middle of the masque scene, and waved his arms wildly. The masque ended, the company scattering offstage. From the masque, the action rapidly moved through the brief scenes with Miranda and Ferdinand, and Prospero and Ariel. There was then a change of locale. Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano tried on the robes of Prospero, until driven off by Prosperos divers spirits in shape of dogs and hounds. In this production the spirits looked like little ferrets, driving the clown characters and Caliban off the stage, into the front rows of the audience. At this point, Prospero appeared as a tired warrior more than
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a magician or a scholar. He had been scarred by time, this uprising on his island serving as reminder of the betrayal of his brother in Milan. Prospero seemed saddened by the inevitability of mankinds avarice. Melancholy and a sense of frustration colored his pronouncement of forgiveness. He began Ye elves of hills, brooks . . . from the steps of the hut/house. Gradually, the company appeared behind Prospero, forming a semicircle around his pool of light. When Prospero pronounced: But this rough magic I here abjure, they were well within that light. Prospero completed the soliloquy then climbed the stairs of the hut/house to withdraw. For the rst time in the production, Prospero/the Director was not visible. The actors looked lost and bewildered. They sat silently for a long pause. Then they quietly withdrew. The silence was broken by a vocal wail from offstage.10 Prospero returned to the stage and quickly went back to business. With a gesture he created a circle of light over the hut/stage as Ariel brought on the once-again somnambulating embassy from Milan. Only the pair of conspiring brothers, Antonio and Sebastian, had their swords drawn. This infuriated Prospero anew. Ariel marched the group into a circle downstage while Prospero crossed to the forestage, eventually exiting. Synthesizer and the strumming of a guitar accented this scene, and a soprano voice could be heard from downstage left. The circle of men awakened. Prospero could be heard offstage (There stand, for you are spell-stopped). The captives circle shrank, then reopened, with the men freezing again. When Prospero reappeared, he was wearing a formal purple gown-length kimono, its train extending three feet behind him as he padded about the stage. Gradually, recognition came to Gonzalo, Antonio, Adrien, Francisco, and the two villains. The discovery of Miranda and Ferdinand at their game of chess again used the hut/ stage discovery space. Synthesizer and soprano voice heightened the joy of the unveiling. Gonzalo directed his O rejoice beyond a common joy to the top row of the audience. Ariel brought on the sleeping crew of the ship, now wide-awake and bewildered. Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban appeared, still in their stolen robes. Stephano was dressed as a king with a green beard and a green, spotlit crown upon his head. The presence and demeanor of Prospero silenced, sobered, and humbled the three drunken men. Calibans expression betrayed his sense of wonderment at humanity. He realized that it was just such a brave new world, with just
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such people in it that had enslaved him. He exited back into his subterranean home beneath the hut/stage. Ariels leavetaking was airborne, to synthesizer accompaniment. In this scene, the rehearsal conceit limited the drama of the sprites departure. Throughout the production, Shakespeares text had been well served by the metatheatrical metaphor established by Ninagawa. But once Ariel was freed by Prospero, he ew off to stage right and freedom. The actor playing Ariel then climbed out of his harness and rejoined the company of actors who had assembled near to where Prospero/the Director would sit for his offstage reading from the promptbook. Ariels role in tonights rehearsal was over, his liberation but a stage trick. All of the company onstage (virtually everyone except for Caliban and Ariel) turned up the ramp of the hut/stage, exiting stage left. The unrepentant pair of conspirators, Antonio and Sebastian, were the last to depart. They hesitated at rst, but gradually fell into step with the rest of the company and left the stage. Prospero returned for the epilogue. He glided out in a halfcrouch, wearing a black overcoat. Let your indulgence set me free once again resonated with the sense that the epilogue marked the end of the play, the end of the rehearsal, perhaps the end of the Directors connection with this community of players. The company reappeared behind Prospero. He broke his staff and scattered the pages of his promptbook. The leaves from his script rippled to the oor slowly as he exited. The formal subtitle for Ninagwas Tempest, A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado, might seem inappropriate. This was an extravagant production of The Tempest, its extraordinary visual effects far removed from the rehearsal process. Moreover, although performed in Japanese, Ninagawa remained faithful to the action of the play, whose No inuences were unobtrusive. For those of us who speak no Japanese but know The Tempest, there was no difculty in following the continuity of the play.11 One must admire his melding of the worlds of Zeami and Shakespeare. The primary element in Ninagawas crossing/intermingling/ shattered mirror was the subtle reection of No theater onto The Tempest. The program notes from the London production described Ninagawas Tempest as in the style of Mugen-No (fan tasy No ). In Mugen-No , the hero, the shite transforms himself
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into a good spirit or evil spirit or apparition, which appears within the dreams of the waki. Thus Prospero was the shite and Miranda became the waki, the witness to Prosperos management of affairs. Particularly during the storm and masque scenes, Miranda observed the action from her tree bough as though she were a spectator. One of Zeamis reigning principles was that of riken-no ken, or viewing oneself from the outside. Zeami also expressed this tenet as do-shin-kensho-no ken or looking from the outside in such a way as if the actor were to stand in the place of the spectator and feel exactly as the spectator would (Rodowicz, Rethinking Zeami, 99). It was from this perspective that Ferdinand and Miranda viewed the masque scene. The tsure are the companion-subsidiary characters in MugenNo drama. Like Miranda, Ferdinand served as waki-tsure, observ ing while the masque scene unfolded with Prospero stage managing his ritual of forgiveness. In this regard, Alonzo, Gonzalo, and the rest of the contingent from Milan were also waki-tsure, forced by Prospero to witness this dramatization, transformed into an audience for his stage production. The comic players in No drama are the Kyogen-Kata. The word kyogen translates most closely to mad words. The Kyogen-Kata are usually servants or lowly local people. Their function is to humorously retell the story of the play between the acts. Here, the Kyogen-KataTrinculo, Stephano, and Calibanreenacted the tale of betrayal and usurpation of Prospero. In Ninagawas Tempest, this was virtually all that there was to the character of Caliban, who was shorn of all of his menace. This Caliban was no symbol of colonial suppression, but a kyogen character, funny and lovable; he was the direct descendant of the Caliban that was largely dismissed as subplot in the Lambs Tales of Shakespeare. Finally, there were the ai-kata. The word ai means interlude. Thus the ai-kata are the characters within the interlude. Traditionally, the ai-kata, in bearing, dress, and language are different from the shite, waki, and kyogen, and serve as a distraction, taking the stage to allow the shite and waki time for costume changes. Ceres, Juno, Irene, and the reapers were the ai-kata in this adaptation of The Tempest, their traditional No costumes set ting them apart from the rest of the company, but their role in the masque was an integral part of the action. It was their assign-
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ment to entice the courtiers from Milan into Prosperos circle of power. The one unclassiable character in this breakdown of No the ater to Shakespearean equivalent was Ariel. Perhaps this is only appropriate, for Ariel, the airborne creature of ever-changing identity and ambivalent sex, is unclassiable. Sometimes dressed in traditional No robes, Ariel was ethereal. His earthbound plea for freedom and Prosperos fury at that request made him, for that moment at least, very human. After being granted freedom, his nal exit was the one instance where the rehearsal conceit seriously deated the drama inherent within the text. Instead of feeling a sense of exhilaration at Ariels hard-earned liberation, we witnessed a very different denouement to Ariels supposed freedom. Instead of being allowed to imagine Ariel ying off to begin a new life somewhere, we saw instead the actor playing Ariel step out of character and rejoin his fellow actors around the playing area. The tradition of Shakespearean production in Japan is built upon adaptation, transformation, distillation, and transmutation. The image in Ninagawas shattered mirror both reects and refracts this. Ninagawa has stated that one of his theatrical goals is to reect reality in my work (Miyashita, Ninagawa Yukio, 404). But Zeami thought that in No theater reality is a detriment to art. In the Japanese aesthetic tradition, art does not reproduce reality, but renes it. A vital allusion in The Tempest is that which Ariel sings of in Full fadom ve . . . where a wasteland becomes transformed. The island of Sado, where Zeami was exiled, was indeed such a wasteland. By setting his Tempest there, Yukio Ninagawa did Shakespeare no disservice:
Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange . . .
Ninagawa, like the earliest of Japanese interpreters of Shakespeare, borrowed and adapted from his traditional theater. Like Kurosawa, he used Shakespeare as scenarist, storyteller, and character-developer. He relocated the text within the frame of Japanese visual and performance tradition, and stressed the plays metatheatricality. It was through this transformation
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process that Ninagawa added to the cross-cultural internationalization of the performance history of Shakespeare, and brought the attention of the West to Japanese stagings of his plays. Ninagawa rose to fame during that period in the 1970s and 1980s when Japan laid claim to a large share of the worlds economic strength and began an acquisition of corporations, properties, and cultural treasures of the West. Ninagawas Tempest was no such acquisition or co-option of Western theater, but a sensitive, intelligent, and visually exciting treatment of Shakespeares play, allowing the cultures of East and West to shine in reected distinction.
7
Peter Brook: The Tempest, 1990
What links The Tempest I staged in Stratford 30 years ago and The Tempest presented this year at the Bouffes du Nord? Thats a stupid question. What links performances in another time and place with an entire cast sharing the same culture and the modern performance in Paris with international actors many of them from Africa? How could there be any formal similarity? Luckily form isnt invented by the producer. A form is the sphota of this situation. One should not confuse the virtual with the actual form. The actual form is what is called a show. Peter Brook, Lauteur, le texte, la forme
WHILE ENJOYING UNIVERSAL PLAUDITS FOR THE CRITICAL AND POPUlar success of the 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Nights Dream, Peter Brook was in the process of abandoning England and British theater and moving his enterprise to Paris. To Brook this move seemed an obvious progression in his directing career. He explained: Paris was a very natural climate for something that is international, that breaks out of certain canons of what is respectable art in the theatre (Georgina Brown, The One Who Got Away.) In the late 1960s, Brook began seeking start-up money for the project that would ultimately lead to the formation of the Centre International de Recherche The a trale (CIRT). On 1 November 1970, a group of actors and directors from Japan, Mali, Romania, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States began their private research work with Brook in Paris. The nancial stability of the CIRT came from philanthropic foundations like the Ford and Anderson Foundations from the United States, the European Gulbenkian Foundation, and for the rst year of the enterprise, from the Shiraz Festival on behalf of the Iranian government. There were also grants from UNESCO, the David 143
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Merrick Arts Foundation, and other sources. 1 The French government provided the companys rehearsal space in Paris. These nancial subsidies left Brook with the freedom to venture away from the commercial marketing of conventional theater. It also led him to believe that he could work under a wider variety of conditions than the traditional repertory and the proscenium stage would allow. Thus, he hoped to realize his quest to create a germinating theater which would evolve something up from the seed; not to add things together, but to make conditions in which something can grow (Williams, Casebook, 167). This image of a budding, nurturing, and evolving theatrical process connects the formation of Brooks CIRT with the great fourteenth-century Japanese No playwright and theorist, Zeami. Indeed, Zeamis dramatic inspiration is one that Brook has long acknowledged.2 The early goals of Brook and the company, aims that had already been pioneered by the Open Theatre, included an unlimited amount of time to develop and explore new and unusual theatrical material. By resisting the obligation to set time constraints, and being nancially secure enough not to be coerced into continually mounting a theatrical season, the CIRT maintained its right to fail. Instead, Brook sought the time to investigate the very nature of what is meant by performance work (Williams, Casebook, 167). Brook saw the CIRT as a center for research, not a school for virtuosi. Improving the skills of the actors within the CIRT was not Brooks goal; nding a common performance vocabulary was. It was Brooks further objective to take what had been achieved within the company of the CIRT and then spread that performance philosophy throughout the theatrical world. Brook saw this as a way of extending the companys inuence into the theatrical mainstream (Brook, The Shifting Point, 1056). In 1974 the CIRT changed its name to the CICT (Centre Inter national de Cre ations The a trales). This name change indicates the organizations transition from an institution where research occurred, into a viable theater company that was committed to the public performance of specic works. In an interview with James Woodall of the London Times, Brook attempted to connect the responsibility which a performance group had to its audience base with his personal desire to, Coriolanus-like, conquer new dramatic worlds with an intercultural theater companynot
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built primarily upon a western theatrical foundation, but rather on exploring the nature of acting with an international voice and spirit.
Ever since I began working outside European culture, I have realized, like Coriolanus, that there is a world elsewhere. What interests me is to bring these worlds together, to see how something of the one can bring out something new and deeper in the other. . . . Im not really interested in the difference between English or French or German or American acting. All Western actors have something in common . . . What I wanted to discover was what that one wordactingmeant to an African, a Balinese, or an Indian. (Stages in a Search for Truth)
The CIRTs travels to Africa and Iran to develop and perform the experimental performance pieces Orghast (1971) and The Conference of the Birds (19721973) moved the company away from Eurocentric culture, and in the direction of a more ritualistic and mystically based theatrical world. Orghast was an attempt to explore what links the roots of language with physical gesture. For Orghast, the English poet Ted Hughes invented a language for the piece, based upon the rhythmic sounds and syllables the company created during their research, exercises, and experiments. In contrast, The Conference of the Birds was a performance piece based upon a twelfth-century Su poem. It was a rich source for free improvisations, a singularly adaptable centerpiece within the companys repertory as they toured from village to village during their African journeys. The shifts and changes in performance style were demonstrated when the CICT returned to Paris and in 1974 staged Shakespeares Timon of Athens in French. For this staging of Shakespeare, the story of Timons rise and fall was related and enacted to an assembled circle of spectators/ performers by a second group of actors, thus reconguring the Iranian and African experiences of Brooks company. On tour, the troupe found that the formation of a human ring produced heightened interaction between spectator and performer. The circle was discovered to be the simplest, purest, and most emotionally satisfying means to connect and shape the companys performance to a gathering of spectators. To emphasize the signicance that the circle came to represent to Brook and the CICT,
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Georges Banus history of Brooks work with the company, Peter ` ` Brook: de Timon dAthenes a La Tempete was subtitled le ` metteur en scene et le cercle. In his account of this staging, Banu wrote that in Brooks production of Timon of Athens everything was organized around levels of circularity (180). Similarly, Michael Billington observed that through the CICT companys experiences in Africa and Iran, Brook and his actors rediscovered the fundamental core of theatrical reality was the communication of a story to a group of people gathered as closely as possible round a company of actors (One Night Stands, 57). David Williams further reiterated the signicance of the circle in the companys staging of Timon. The actors consciously positioned themselves as storytellers. By doing so, they distanced themselves from their roles. While rst seated on cushions in a tight, inner circle, the actors/storytellers gradually moved about to all levels of the circular seating/playing area. The circle was the key to the organic structure of the staging of Timon. The banquet scenes staged in this circular manner took on a mythic quality and provided focus while spatially reecting the changing relationships within the play (Williams, A Place Marked by Life, 4344). The circular storytelling image was combined in Timon with other African and Asian borrowings which included the use of shadow puppets and a stage design of minimalist Persian decor, consisting largely of brightly colored cushions. Throughout the production, Brooks empty performance space prevailed; decor was minimal. A screen projecting ominous silhouettes was employed. After the interval, Timon was pinned to the ground in a Beckettian no-mans land (ibid., 44). The production abounded in allegorical reference, many of which were adduced from the costuming. Timon, for example, began the play as an ostentatious captain of industry, gaudily at tired in designer white suit and gold lame shirt. After the interval and Timons economic decline, the gold shirt was gone, his white suit in tatters. Alcibiades was dressed as a caricature of a banana republic potentate, his status emblemized by his costumea resplendent black military full-dress uniform, adorned with white sash, red cloak, epaulettes, medals, and shining buttons (ibid., 45). Timons sycophantic, hypocritical cronies appearance was appropriately gaudy and garish; their costumes were lavish Persian brocade gowns that recalled Arab markets and street bazaars.
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The character of Apemantus became an all-knowing fool. As such, he was positioned outside of, or just on the fringe of, the company circle, and, like the audience, observed and judged the plays action (ibid., 44). Before their success with the production of Timon of Athens, the CICT was considered extremely adept at free, improvisatory forms, yet artistically lacking in skill and experience with textbased material. This was in part a result of the non-languagebased theater work the company had been performing in Africa and Iran. This reputation for an inability to mount productions based upon the great works of Western dramatic literature changed in the late 1970s when the company began work on such text-driven and problematic works of the Western canon as Ubu aux Bouffes (1977), Mesure pour Mesure (1978), and La Cerisaie (1981). These challenging and script-driven works, when combined with the companys experiences and experiments with improvisation, storytelling, mysticism, and myth from their excursions into African or Asian site-specic theater, led to the development of a theatrical style which Brook described as . . . sound, rhythm, movementThe concrete nature of what seems abstract (Billington, Written on the Wind: The Dramatic Art of Peter Brook). This seemingly oxymoronic quality of being able to theatrically create and enact tangible abstraction provided a strategy for introducing their non-Western inuences and experiences into the performance of the Western dramatic pieces they were now beginning to mount. This dichotomy served the company especially well as they created their production of The Tempest in 1990. As the 1968 experiment with The Tempest evolved at least in part from Brooks dissatisfaction with his 1957 traditional approach to the play, this 1990 multinational, intercultural production was also partially an attempt to uncover many of the plays riches that were obscured in the 1968 stagings free-form improvisations. Whereas the 1957 production was dutifully bound to Shakespeares English-language text, and the 1968 production was a virtually unscripted variation upon themes from the play, this 1990 production was a new, modern French adap` tation by Brooks collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrie re. Modern French enabled Brook to use one of his great talentswhat Poh Sim Plowright calls his paradoxical respect and disrespect for
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the text (Shakespeare and Hana, 53). This regard for the script without feeling a need to hold the written word as sacred contributed to a subversion of the text which has been an important element in liberating Brooks ability to create memorable theatrical representations. By employing French for the production, Brook was freed from the rigidity sometimes imposed by the ` use of Shakespeares own language and text. Carrieres contribution to the production evolved in large part from his textual dexterity in bringing into focus the connection between Shakespeares play and this intercultural troupe of variegated actors. ` Carrieres French translation was modern and colloquial. For example, in his adaptation of The Tempest, Caliban, described by Prospero in Shakespeares text as this thing of darkness, be came the more mysterious cet objet dobscurite. Brook asserts the value of such a modern translation: it is simpler and the French audience understands it better than an English audience understands Shakespeare. It is modern in the sense that the words are natural, normal words, not those which have passed out of usage (Raymond, Peter Brook as Prospero, 20).3 The most signicant colloquial mots rayonnants in this production related to the contemporary French vernacular idiom for going madavoir le coup de bamboo. The bamboo image was exploited throughout the production. Long bamboo poles, rainsticks, and canes were used in nearly every scene as metaphorical implements of magic, madness, and mirth. Indeed, it was the use of bamboo poles, miniature ships, hoops, and other such mundane found objects which led Elena Dapporto, in La Gazzetta di Firenze, to describe Ariel and Prospero as intermediaries between the sacred and the everyday. ` The result of Carriere and Brooks labors was a Tempest that was 150 minutes long, staged without an interval. The production was marked by the companys use of the intercultural strategies that had evolved since their African and Asian performance work. The presence onstage of a Black Shaman/magician Prospero subverted the Western traditional reading of the play as a metaphor for Elizabethan white men taking possession of, and ultimately taming, an exotic, alien environment. In this production, Prospero was played by Sotigui Kouyate, a longtime member of Brooks company, a featured actor in the companys production of The Mahabharata, and a native of the West African republic of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). Bakary Sangere, who por-
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trayed Ariel, is from the neighboring West African nation of Mali. The appearance of these black Africans in the crucial roles of Prospero and Ariel altered the plays focus and caused confusion, consternation, and some lack of comprehension among several critics. Masolino dAmico, for example, referred to the perform ance of Kouyate as an interpretation of Prospero gone native. The criticism surrounding Brooks unconventional casting raised the issue of Primitivism vs. Orientalism vs. Interculturalism that has dogged Brook, especially since the 1985 staging of The Mahabharata. Marianna Torgovnik addresses these issues in her book Gone Primitive:
To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives images and ideas that I call tropes. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the lowest cultural levels; we occupy the highest. The ensemble of these tropeshowever miscellaneous and contradictoryform the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse. (8)
Brooks own statements have helped to fan the ames of the primitivist controversy, which include accusations that his casting of black Africans as Prospero and Ariel amounted to exploitational primitivism. In a 1991 interview with Gerard Raymond, for example, Brook claimed that Kouyate s interpretation of Prospero was shaped by hundreds of years of storytelling tradition and everything else that is in his nature. In his introductory ` essay to the published version of Carrie res adaptation of The Tempest, Une nigme, Brook wrote that the cultures of Kouye ate and Sangere, were civilizations where images of gods, of magicians, of witches, of phantoms evoke profound human realities(4). It is these allusions to his African actors intrinsic storytelling tradition and their native cultural heritage of witches and phantasmagoria that make Brook so vulnerable to charges of cultural exploitation and primitivism. The intercultural composition of the CICT company, which formed the backbone for the casting for this production of The Tempest, was defended by Brook in The Shifting Point. There,
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Brook wrote a kind of statement of purpose describing the philosophy leading to the development of the CIRT company. This manifesto might well serve as theoretical explanation for the unusual casting of The Tempest, and Brooks attempt at a defense against charges of colonial primitivism as well.
. . . Our rst task was to try to put an end to the stereotypes, but certainly not to reduce everyone to a neutral anonymity. Stripped of his ethnic mannerisms a Japanese becomes more Japanese, an African more African, and a point is reached where forms of behavior and expression are no longer predictable. A new situation emerges which enables people of all origins to create together, and what they create takes on a color of its own. This is not unlike what happens in a piece of orchestral music, where each sound keeps its identity while merging into a new event. (1056)
Elsewhere in The Shifting Point, Brook discussed a kind of self-inicted ethnic stereotyping that he sought within the CICT company to explore, subvert, and ultimately, to eliminate.
. . . we found that popular cliches about each persons culture were often shared by the person himself. He came to us believing that he was part of a specic culture, and gradually through work discovered that what he took to be his culture was only the supercial mannerism of that culture, that something very different reected his deepest culture and deepest individuality. To become true to himself, he had to shed the supercial traits which in every country are seized upon and cultivated. (23839)
The intercultural, amorphous structure of the CICT company provided the nucleus, philosophy, and shape for this investigation of The Tempesta minimalist, intercultural reading of the play. This production of The Tempest seemed not so much a postcolonial interpretation of the text, as it was a post-Artaudian reading. Artauds theater called for a stripping away of the layers of civilization in order to expose an innitely more mysterious and secret domain (uvres, 4:87). In this production, Brook sought thematic and scenic simplicity through elimination of theatrical trickery and pretense, substituting instead a sense of an exotic, ethereal justication for the plays magic. Critics, reviewers, and theorists have striven mightily to analyze Brooks work process with the CICT. Brook has offered little
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help in this endeavor. He described in The Open Door his horror at having allowed a very serious author permission to observe the CICTs process, only to nd observations in print (119). As a result of this perceived betrayal, Brook has forbidden outsiders from watching his rehearsals. He argues that actors are, by nature, fearful and oversensitive, and must be protected through silence, intimacy, and secrecy. A result of the covert nature of the CICTs methodology is that much of what follows here, concerning the creative process which culminated in The Tempest, is Brooks own version of events: details he relates in the nal chapter, ironically entitled There Are No Secrets, of his book The Open Door. The clandestine nature of the CICT in rehearsal has caused writers to provide their own spin on what occurs as the CICT develops a work. Jeremy Kingston called the developmental process of the Brook company research into the nature of theatre . . . exploring ways to occupy the empty space. Margaret Croyden dened it as though the work of the company was straight from Treplevs vision for a new theater in Chekhovs The Sea Gull, referring to it as explor(ing) new ideas and new forms (Peter Brook Creates a Nine-Hour Epic). In dealing specically with Brook as a director of Shakespeare, Michael Billington demystied the process somewhat by saying, Brook is, in a sense, the one truly Shakespearian director we have: the only one who actually uses the dramatist as a practical working guide and who likewise aspires to take the Rough with the Holy (Brooks Dream). It is holy theater in transcending the surface of the everyday, while, within the same production, incorporating aspects of rough theater through the inclusion of elements from popular entertainment. The development of Brooks research center in Paris was marked by his changing philosophy concerning the kinds of theatrical performances he was seeking to stage, not necessarily the materials which he would use in staging those performances. When the company began to stage Western classical works in the mid-1970s, they performed these works in the manner of their African/Asian experiences, and as the result of the companys variegated and multicultural chemistry. This development of theatrical imagining evolved from eclectic borrowing of the performance styles and dramatic theories represented by Brooks own 1960s stagings of King Lear, Marat/Sade, and A Midsummer
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Nights Dream. It also came about as an evolution of the rehearsal processes that led to the 1968 Tempest project at the Roundhouse in London. Yoshi Oida, the one actor to perform in both the 1968 and 1990 productions of The Tempest, described the 1968 process as quite primitive and unformed, compared with the developmental process of today. The 1990 production of The Tempest was an offshoot of those same games, improvisations, and exercises that informed the 1968 Tempest experiment. For this Tempest, much of the experimentation occurred as the company worked over a ten-day period in seclusion at Avignon. In much the same way that the training camp experience intends to provide separate individuals on sports teams with the unity needed in order to perform with maximum cohesion, at Avignon the rehearsal process consisted of group exercises to create a vibrant team. These exercises included playing with various objects, such as the bamboo sticks that were to become so integral a part of the eventual performance. The exercises were intended to develop quick hand response, as well as to draw the members of the company together through visual and aural contact and communication. The vocal exercises and improvisations in which the company participated were both comic and serious, an appropriate choice for a play which also blends both genres. Gradually, wordssingle, then clusters, then isolated phrases, both in English and Frenchwere introduced in order to try to make clear to everyone involved in the production the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Shakespeares dramaturgy (Brook, The Open Door, 130). Apparently what followed next was an exercise in vocal imitation, somewhat analogous to the companys mirroring work. This process was borrowed from the rehearsal process on Brooks 1981 adaptation of Carmen. When actors could not break from what Brook referred to as generalized acting, one of Brooks ` collaborators, usually Carriere, would step in, reading the role for them. Brook wrote that: Once the imitation was successfully mastered, the old technique was broken and [the actor] could now proceed to discover his own details in his own way, eshing out the specics of his character for himself (ibid., 134). Brook used the analogy of a child throwing aside a life belt after he had learned to swim. This process sounds quite similar to Giorgio Strehlers habit of critiquing his actors while doing his own simultaneous offstage
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performance.4 It also sounds quite close to the American actorabhorred practice of being given line readings. In defense of this exercise, Brook cautioned: What must be avoided is the director demonstrating the way he himself would like the part to be played and then forcing the actor to assume and stick to this alien, imposed construction. Instead, the actor must be stimulated all the time so that in the end he nds his own way (ibid., 135). Perhaps this also provides an explanation for Brooks creation of a protective and cloistered environment while his actors discover the direction that they seek. After Avignon, the next step in the development of the work took place upon the companys return to the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. There, the set designer Chloe Obolensky prepared scenic possibilitiesropes hanging from the ceiling, ladders, planks, blocks of wood, packing cases, carpets, piles of earth of different colors, spades, and shovels. Through the use of these objects, many of which were to nd their way into the nal production, the actors were encouraged to improvise the plays scenes in as many ways as possible. This practice suggests the freedom within Brooks rehearsal process, the reverse effect of the imitation/linereading exercise described above. Brooks account of this improvisational, experimental, creative phase of the rehearsal process used words and phrases like possibilities . . . state of confusion . . . ideas suggested, rejected, criticized, withdrawn, explored . . . the creation of a vast amount of raw material from which nal shapes can be created (ibid., 132). In any event, this work of discovery led directly into a highly imaginative, yet remarkably simple production of The Tempest. Marvin Carlson has noted that the sand on the oor of the stage, the African and Asian instrumentalists in full view and seated on Persian carpets, the owing robes of the actors, and the extreme visual simplicity of the staging, all illustrate the impact of The Mahabharata upon this production (Review of 199091 La Tempe te, 1920). Other Asian cultures were also referenced in this scenography. Both Georges Banu and Poh Sim Plowright commented upon the impact of the Japanese Zen garden on Chloe Obolenskys eventual choice of stage design. Banu describes the limited universe of stone and rock within the Zen temples (particularly those of the Zen gardens in Kyoto) as an ideal metaphor for an ordered world infused by both reality and spirituality, where the visitor cannot ignore the omnipresence of either. Banu
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argues that Brook and Obolensky sought to recreate this same contrary nature on Prosperos island, thus emphasizing Prosperos position as rational ombudsman and judge of mortal malfeasance, and his spiritual role as master and magus over this barren and ordered space (Peter Brook, 238). Prosperos island was a rectangular sandpit, about the size of a tennis court, its boundaries delineated by more of the bamboo canes which bore such symbolic and theatrical importance throughout the production.5 The island was raked into concentric spirals with a single rough marble rock upstage in one corner suggesting something of both Prosperos island and of the shattered hull of a beached ship (Williams, Horizons of the Real, 414). Williams also interpreted the island as a representation of a childs playground. Plowright took that metaphor even further, quoting William Blake, and seeing Obolenskys set design of Prosperos island as an allegorical playground in which the whole world could be seen through a grain of sand just as the whole of Life could be felt through the three-hour duration of the play (Shakespeare and Hana, 52).6 The music provided by Mahmoud Tabrizi-Zadeh on Persian dulcimer and kamantches and Toshi Tsuchitori on Japanese percussion, blended Asian and African musicianship. These nonwestern instruments provided the necessary and haunting ambiance of this magical place of sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. At times during the performance this mysterious island would echo with frenzied drumming and percussive resonance, at other moments, with the exotic tintinnabulation of gongs and bells. The productions use of two musicians to represent an orchestra was dramatically replicated in the banquet scene where a small tray of fruit became a metaphoric feast. Claudio Cumani observed that this miniature cornucopia of fruit stresses one of the points emphasized throughout the production; humanity is capable of nding inviting foods in all cultures; not just its own (Review of 199091 La Tempete). This stress upon the discovery of delicacies on the table of another culture might well serve as yet another dening metaphor for this intercultural reading of The Tempest. 7 The Tempest began once the musicians settled into position. Ariel, with a headpiece conguring a model of a ship with red sails and a hull of wooden logs, walked across the sand in silence and
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deep concentration. At a specic point on the sand stage near to where Prospero was seated, he removed the headpiece and planted it in the sand. The plays rst magical event then occurred; the headgear transformed itself into a miniature, beached ship. Prospero studied it, and gradually, magically, seemed to cause a tempest to emanate from it. This opening scene carried with it a strong sense of non-Western ritual. While Prospero focused his energy on the tiny beached craft, Ariel moved behind him and manipulated a long, thick, and elaborately decorated hollowed log lled with seashells.8 Ariels movement of this traditional rainstick foreshadowed the imminent storm with an undulating, slow motion, accompanied by the percussive sound of the rattling shells. As Prospero and Ariel created the storm at sea, a group of actors ran out onto the performance space and began to show its effects upon the men onboard ship. This action became the focus for the stage picture, while Prospero and Ariel blended into the background, creating the equivalent of a cinematic fade-out, fade-in crosscut (Williams, Casebook, 415). For the storm sequence, the passengers and crew of the foundering ship carried long bamboo sticks. On board ship, the bamboo poles also served as the ships straining masts, its deck and railings, and the rising water level as the vessel cracked and shattered. The Ships Captain and the Boatswain were costumed in long, dark pajama-like outts. The Captain held his bamboo pole straight up, as though desperately attempting to steer the ship back under his control. Ariel and two green-clad spirit helpers invaded the ship space and by their gestures caused the storm to intensify. The courtiers from Milan and Naples appeared on deck dressed in black trousers, owing white shirts, and long black outer coats.9 They grappled with the storm by struggling with their bamboo poles, which represented both the ship and the waves. Yoshi Oida, playing Gonzalo, used his remarkable physical abilities to represent a drowning man. He held his bamboo stick horizontally in front of his body, quickly transforming his staff into the surface of the ocean. He lifted it to his shoulders, then to his chin, eyed it with panic, raised it above his head, and brought it down again to his chin. He was a desperate man gasping for breath, as though he were submerged underwater for what he feared would be the last time. Plowright perceived the presentation of the storm scene in terms of an allegory for children. She
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wrote that the storm scene was staged like a childrens charade . . . an imaginary terrain in which the real and the illusory were indistinguishable (5253). This is a credit to the particularity with which the company staged this disaster. While performed in highly stylized manner, the scene still managed to recreate the actual horror of such a situation upon its victims. As the storm subsided and the courtiers exited upstage, Prospero stood with Miranda downstage, dominating his island home. They held hands as Prospero looked out beyond the dimensions of his island, giving his account of the circumstances that led to their arrival. Prospero then asked Miranda to share her earliest memories with him. While Prospero questioned Miranda, he held an amulet above her head. As Miranda relived and remembered her childhood, she closed her eyes. Similarly, later in this same scene, as Prospero reected upon those volumes that I prize above my dukedom, his remembrance was conveyed with closed eyes, hushed reverence, and a mood which conveyed some of the solemnity of sacred African ritual. As Prospero continued with his exposition and further described the gentleness of the noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, Oida walked wearily across the back of the stage to sit upon the solitary rock. Prospero continued his narrative, telling Miranda of his justication for the tempest and his betrayal by Sebastian and Alonzo. The elements of story theater continued; three noblemen, separated from Ferdinand, crossed the stage, looking desperate and spent. When Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio nally exited, Gonzalo slowly and sadly rose from the rock and followed them offstage. When Prospero insisted that Miranda ask no more questions and go to sleep (Ne me pose plus de question. / Tu as sommeil. Bonne torpeur. / Abandonne-toi, tu nas pas le choix, je le sais) in order that he and Ariel might discuss the results of the tempest, Miranda was positioned on the ground facing straight ahead, her body stiffened, her face expressionless as though she was falling under a spell. Behind her, Prospero practiced a most loving and protective form of his magical power upon Miranda. In his left hand he again held his dark amulet on a chain, using it like a hypnotists gold watch, while his right hand was delicately extended just over the back of Mirandas head. This was a very youthful, early adolescent Miranda, extraordinarily malleable in the hands of her father. The stage picture depicted a Prospero
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who was simultaneously a powerful magician and a protective father.10 Miranda moved to the same rock that Gonzalo had used, and quickly fell asleep. Ariel approached Prospero, who sat down next to him in the sand. Prospero asked Ariel, As-tu bien accompli mes ordres de tempe te? Ariel proudly responded by using the wooden log/ headpiece to demonstrate where he hurled his thunderbolts. He then used his voice to recreate the sounds his destruction wrought. This demonstration pleased Prospero. When Prospero ` asked Ariel, Ou donc en est le jour? Ariel used the metal rings built onto the sides of the proscenium arch to climb to the uppermost height of the theater. When he reached his perch, looking as if he was once again observing his handiwork from the ships topmast, he showed Prospero the precise location of the beleaguered vessel. In keeping with the productions resolute determination to focus upon The Tempests themes without placing the play in the postcolonial context that has become so much a part of its recent stage history within Western culture, Caliban was played as a dwarsh white ragamufn. (Ironically, Dominique Goy-Blanquet described Caliban as the degenerate offspring of white colonials.)11 For his rst entrance, Caliban carried on an old cardboard box in which he sat while eating his dinner. The cardboard box, signier of contemporary urban housing for the dispossessed, was Calibans home. Calibans dinner consisted of a meager yam. He demonstrated his dislike for it by spitting it out onto the sand. Fearful, after Prospero threatened and reproached him, Caliban ran up a rope on the opposite side of the proscenium arch from that which Ariel had previously scaled. Caliban and Ariel were polar opposites on facing theatrical walls. Both were staged in a raised position sitting on the edges of the proscenium arch, observing the action occurring below. Caliban was wrapped in a ragtag robe/blanket of brown burlap. He strained mightily against the thick rope, symbolic of his entrapment. His muscles, particularly those in his neck, were taut with pressure; his face was red with undisguised fury. Ariel, by contrast, sat aloft in placid serenity. Dressed in his owing white robe, and above the tempest roiling below, Ariel conveyed no earthly stress; he seemed to be an air spirit, unfettered, and above worldly concerns. By contrast, Caliban was tethered on a
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tight leash and appeared so volatile that he seemed on the verge of explosion. When Prospero forced Caliban to bend to his will, he used both physical punishment and the psychological threat of more such abuse. In one such instance, Prospero used his walking stick to immobilize Caliban on the ground. Prosperos staff was across Calibans chest. Caliban rolled in pain and terror as Prospero looked down impassively upon him. During another confrontation, Prospero stood behind the kneeling Caliban. Prospero was poised, leaning upon his walking stick, his left arm planted on his hip. He looked like a stern martinet father rebuking a rather defenseless and innocent child. Caliban had his hands under his nose, his ngers extended, creating the effect of cat whiskers. His appearance was like that of an infant attempting to disappear behind his hands during a game of peek-a-boo. He was focused outward and upward, as though seeking his mother, Sycorax, for her to grant him divine protection from Prosperos derision. This Caliban was no match for the magical power and anger of his master. When the exiles on Prosperos island reached their rst destination, where Antonio and Sebastian were to plot their murder of Alonzo and Gonzalo, the latter character was staged apart, on the sand oor. Gonzalo was surrounded by sandcastles, created by Prospero and Ariels green-clad spirit emissaries. These structures, a tangible representation of the stuff that dreams are made on, were actually inverted owerpots lled with sand. This sandcastle world then became a key visual stage image for Gonzalo. As he mused upon the utopian colony he pictured himself governing, one of Ariels spirit/emissaries stood behind him. The spirit held a thin stick with a large leaf on its top. The leaf transformed into a magical birds wings, and was representative of the strange and wondrous creatures that inhabited not only this island, but the magical, imaginary world which Gonzalo dreamed of commanding. The moments in the play dominated by such examples of Prosperos magical power were offset by occasions when Prospero and the other occupants of the island showed their humanity. In Act 3, scene 1, after Ferdinand endured the comic pranks of Ariels spirits who repeatedly stole his accumulated logs, Ferdinand and Miranda exchanged their vows of love. A forest was created by the spirits standing apart, holding their bamboo sticks upright and
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signifying a pastoral, romantic retreat within this magical island. The spirits looked vacantly out upon the audience, discreetly avoiding eye contact and intrusion into this scene of young love and intimacy. This moment was indicative of another signicant element in the productionthe rapid shifting of mood and intensity, from hilarity to romance, high velocity to immobility, stillness to cacophony. During the encounter between Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero was positioned upstage, in between and behind the two young lovers. His appearance was quite unlike that of the Prospero in Giorgio Strehlers 1978 production. There, Prospero was a theatrical director observing a scene of his own devising. Here, Prospero was, instead, a highly interested spectator. While he was indeed the creator of the theatrical interaction, at this moment he appeared to be the ideal audience member, a one-man Greek chorus, the hypercurious onlooker, anxious for the outcome of the staged theatrical event. In contrast to this gentle, romantic interlude, the rst entrance of the clown gures, Stephano and Trinculo, included improvisation in gibberish and extensive use of commedia comic business. As they were reunited, the two clowns, suddenly recognizing each other as Neapolitan gentlemen, went off into a torrent of mock Italian, which concluded in a jeering operatic aria.12 The clown sections of the production were replete with homage to the commedia dellarte origins of these characters. For example, when Stephano, role-playing the king for Calibans benet, imperiously ordered Trinculo to stand further off, Bruce Myers wandered away to the back wall of the stage. Plus loin, cried Maratrat, and Myers tried to walk through the wall (Hunt and Reeves, Peter Brook, 270). In the scene in which Trinculo and Stephano don Prosperos royal robes, the two zanni gamboled with exuberant ourishes, appearing and behaving like mad amencos. For this comic display, as Trinculo and Stephano were on their way to murder Prospero, Ariels spirit helpers formed a bamboo frame for Ariel to echo the preening Stephano and Trinculo in mocking reection. The clown conspirators were distracted by the bright clothes, thrown commedia-style from the wings. Stephano began dressing himself up as a ridiculous king; red robes, green breeches tied round his neck, a silly hat. Behind him the spirits swiftly formed their bamboo sticks into a mirror frame, and, as
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Stephano strutted and posed, Bakary Sangere/Ariel appeared in the mirror. White/French Stephano and black/African Ariel proceeded to perform their own intercultural version of Harpo and Chicos mirror sequence from the Marx Brothers Duck Soup. Plowright read this merriment seriously, detecting a strong Japanese No metatheatrical tone in this mock-mirror exercise:
What struck me was the No-like economy . . . daring the spectators to see their own reections in the story almost in the same way that the xed mirror panel at the back of the No stage invites audiences to see themselves or be drawn into its illusory world and by so doing, perhaps nd enlightenment. (53)
In the nal redemption scene, Caliban accusingly referred to Trinculo as Ce pauvre idiot. Bruce Myers turned this into a moment of comical self-denial. Trinculo reacted here, not in contrition, but with a blank, amazed expression of stunned disbelief that he could possibly be perceived as a dolt.13 The productions use of commedia dellarte references were not limited to those scenes which involved the plays clown characters. In the scene in which Ferdinand proved his obedience to Prospero and his dedication to Miranda by hauling and piling wooden logs, two of Ariels spirits became invisible Arlecchinos, stealing the piled logs and continually lining them up again for repiling. These spirits, clearly apparent to the audience but not to their foils, also dangled objects like tropical plants and butteries in front of their victims, particularly Gonzalo and Ferdinand. By such means, throughout the production, was the invisible made visible. The roles of Ariels spirit assistants were integral to the production, serving not only as Ariels emissaries, but as stagehands, and even as parts of the scenic landscape. The fairy spirits became the productions stagehands during the Trinculo-StephanoCaliban scenes, and after the banquet and the masque. In those scenes, the spirits removed wine jugs, food, hoops, ribbons, and costume paraphernalia. At the moment when Ferdinand, struck with fury at Prosperos demands and insults, prepared to draw his sword and attack him, one of the spirit assistants again became a part of the scenic landscape. Ariel stood to stage right leaning upon that same thick, hollowed length of bamboo which he used as rainstick and magic wand during the storm scene. Fer-
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dinand performed what appeared to be a cross between an elaborate dance step and a karate move as he held his black sword in both his hands. His attempt at attacking Prospero was thwarted by Ariel, smiling at the ease with which he immobilized Ferdinand. The latter attempted to leap over a mysterious piece of island vegetation created by one of the green-costumed and hunkered spirits, who held a fanlike extension of leaves in front of himself. Two thin sticks extended out to either side, on the tops of which were one red and one white buttery. Thus, an entire forest was magically suggested by the movements of this anthropomorphically constructed palm tree. The banquet, like all of the other spectacle scenes in the production, was staged with great simplicity and very little pyrotechnic effect. Ariels ubiquitous aides brought the courtiers repast in on a low Japanese serving table. The noblemen were offered a variety of grapes and wine. Ariel and the spirit assistants, visible to the audience, yet unseen by Antonio, Gonzalo, Alonzo, and Sebastian, began to partake of the offerings. They mimed the pleasures of eating the feast and drinking the wine. In terror, the courtiers cowered and retreated from the table. As they observed their intended banquet being magically consumed, they left their own plates untouched. The unseen spirits then quickly struck the table and its contents, their invisibility serving as the stage directions quaint device. The masque scene, although much shortened, continued the productions intercultural exchange and theatrical simplicity. The masque borrowed from the mystical force eld successfully conjured in The Mahabharata. After that production, Brook wrote in The Shifting Point of the challenges and difculties presented when one attempts to enact gods upon the stage. For both The Mahabharata and The Tempest, Brook believed that he found the solution in the use of the exotic mask.
It is quite clear that an ordinary actor pretending to be a god is ridiculous . . . in productions of The Tempest . . . a lot of girls try to be goddesses; [and] The Tempest is usually a disaster. So you have to turn to something that can help you, and the rst thing is a mask that contains forces in it and evokes stronger forces than the actor can evoke himself. I have never seen them used in the Western theatre in this way, and I think it is something very dangerous to us to approach without a lot of experiment and understanding. In the East or in Af-
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rica, this kind of mask is used more in ritual but in a sense for the same purpose, which is to bring into the open abstract things that otherwise are just called forces, so that they take on esh and blood. (22627)
The spirit assistants began the masque spectacle by covering the sand with a billowing gold cloth. As Miranda entered the space, one of the spirit assistants carried in two bamboo sticks that held a white lace shawl, symbolic of Mirandas purity. The bamboo sticks were transformed into a movable picture frame for Miranda. The spirit then dropped the shawl over Mirandas shoulders before exiting. Miranda took her seat to observe the pageant. The wedding masque as play-within-a-play was staged in similar fashion to a staging of the mousetrap scene in Hamlet. Ferdinand joined Miranda on stage left, with Prospero at stage right, watching both the masque and its impact upon the young lovers. A smoke-trail of incense lled Prosperos masque/theater. The goddesses appeared, performed, dancing in a circle. Their costuming was another example of intercultural borrowing. The goddesses wore white painted Korean masks and golden robes with diaphanous red headdresses; their African bubus were cut to appear like Indian saris. Claudio Cumani observed that this emphasis upon non-Western signiers and ritual created a magical, yet almost tangible connection between the visible and the invisible. The goddesses, whom Prosperos magic conjured in order to entertain Ferdinand and Miranda, were quickly disposed of. Almost immediately after the arrival of the dancing nymphs, Prospero recalled that foul conspiracy, and the masque scene was abruptly aborted. The concluding scene between Prospero and Ariel was performed with a quiet dignity that underlined the strong bond between magician and acolyte. The moment before freeing Ariel, Prospero held his dainty tightly in his arms. Both characters stared straight ahead; Prosperos abjuration of his rough magic left Ariel with a sense of his own lack of purpose. With his freedom imminent, the serene Ariel became unsettled and tentative. These feelings were dramatized by a tearful pause and backward glance as Ariel slowly moved away. Prospero remained silent and saddened, alone in the center of his magical circle of pebbles in the sand. After Prosperos nal speech, one of the spirit assis-
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tants quietly raked the sand, reconguring the playing area back to the zero degree that was the productions starting point. This concluding stage moment was a nal testimony to the cyclical nature of the production and of life itself. The stage lights revealed the rectangle of raked sand and the single rock that opened the production. The Tempests magic was ready to be replayed; the distinction between illusion and reality, beginning and end, was obscured. Ultimately, The Tempest was the incorporation of the storytelling techniques which Brook and the company practiced throughout their history. This most recent of Brooks investigations of The Tempest moved away from the metatheatricality of other productions, where the dominant elements were those of illusion, theater, and art. For this staging, Brook argued that The Tempests essential theme is not the illusion of the theatre, not the stage, but life (Une nigme, 34). In order to stage this thesis, e Brook turned Prosperos renunciation of the world of magic and illusion into his own denial of theatrical virtuosity and pyrotechnics. Everything was intended to emanate not from the director, but from the actors, who were called upon by Brook to furnish the space, the silences, and the fable itself with clarity and lightness. Therefore, great emphasis was placed upon semiotics within the performancethe representations and the signs created by the light, the sand, the music, and the bamboo-wielding company. What magic emanated from this production came from its spare, compressed, yet highly effective use of theatrical illusion. In this minimalist production, a bowl of fruit was a banquet, three exotic leaves a forest, and four sticks of bamboo a cave, or a ship in peril. The sound of sand passing through a tube on Ariels head was a tempest, and Brooks vaunted empty space was an island of magic and mystery.
8
The Boy in the Sandbox
O good Gonzalo, My true preserver, and a loyal sir To him thou followst! (5.1.6870)
IN CHARTING THE DIFFERENCES IN PETER BROOKS WORK ON THE

Tempest between 1957 and the production of 1990, one can note the philosophical differences between the young director who observed in 1955 that it is the directors job to restore to the work what it has lost in its passage from the authors dream to the authors manuscript, and the elder statesman of the theater who conceded that, at least with Shakespeare, determining what the playwright dreamed about his work was fruitless and impossible. It was the mature Brook who acknowledged that:
. . . the awful approach to Shakespeare . . . says: We have to do the play as Shakespeare wrote it. Rubbish! No one knows what was going on in his head. All we know is that he wrote a sequence of words which can give birth to constantly novel forms.
This changed attitude is reected in Brooks 1957, 1968, and 1990 productions of The Tempest, which illustrate widely disparate approaches to the very notion of presenting Shakespeare upon the stage. The 1957 production, for all of its eclecticism, was still an attempt to do the play as Shakespeare wrote it. It was of its moment, yet the production failed to create any new perceptions of the text, focusing instead upon the plays spectacle by means of elaborate theatrical effects. In the 1968 exercise on themes from The Tempest, Brook sought insights, not from the text, but from the variations created through the improvisational energy of his company of actors. This production was also of its 164
8: THE BOY IN THE SANDBOX
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moment (perhaps more so than any other staging in this survey). Its incompleteness and labeling as a theatrical experiment largely removes it from the burdens of textual analysis. It nevertheless became a springboard, a creative fount, from which Brook could establish a starting place for his text-driven yet free-owing and innovative production of A Midsummer Nights Dream of 1970, and his 1990 minimalist and intercultural reading of The Tempest. The differences between Strehlers two productions of The Tempest are not nearly so radical as are those among Brooks three stagings. The changes between Strehlers 1948 production and his 1978 staging are primarily in the areas of directorial development, maturity, and economy. While the 1948 staging in the Boboli Gardens in Florence was quite elaborate, it was performed only three times, and mounted after a seven-week rehearsal/construction period. The 1978 production was a culminating interpretation by one of Europes acknowledged visionary scenic writer/directors, using the text of The Tempest to reect upon the role of the stage director within the creative process. Some critics saw this production as Strehlers autobiographical appraisal of his career as a creator of theatrical magic. The 1978 production required nearly a year of rehearsal time. Another six months of reevaluation and remounting transpired in 1984 before its revival and subsequent world tour. It is possible to see Strehlers two productions of The Tempest as a reworking and redevelopment of the same production, with the advantages of the added maturity of the director and a more exible production schedule and budget. The 1978 productions carefully choreographed scenes between Ariel and Prospero (to many viewers the most poignant moments in the production), could be perceived as a meticulous redevelopmentan attempt to polish dramatic moments whose possibilities had only been roughly sketched into the rst production. Similarly, Strehlers self-criticism on the lack of development brought to the characters of Caliban and Ariel in the 1948 production led to more dramatically forceful choices for those characters in the 1978 staging. However, the one dramaturgical difference between Strehlers two Tempests, was signicant. The dening moment of the 1948 production was the elaborate, baroque masque scene, symbolizing Italys rebirth from the ravages of World War II.
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With no such contemporary metaphor in 1978, Strehler chose to omit the masque scene entirely. The stage interpretation of Caliban through these six productions may well offer reections of their specic time and place in performance history better than any other measuring stick. It was immediately after World War II that literary criticism and Shakespeare-in-performance studies began perceiving The Tempest as a tract on colonialism, associating Caliban with Third World native peoples (Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeares Caliban, 402). The postwar era often saw Caliban onstage as the displaced Native American. In the United States, such acclaimed African American actors as Canada Lee, Earle Hyman, and James Earl Jones enacted Caliban. The role was sympathetically interpreted as either that of the noble savage or of the displaced outsider. The 1970s saw Caliban transformed in America into a black militant, a Shakespearean representation of the African American political activist (ibid., 403). Such politicization had little or no impact upon the interpretations of Caliban in Strehlers 1948 production or Brooks 1957 staging. In Strehlers staging, Caliban was portrayed as a sympathetic but subhuman outcast, controlled by Prospero, easily duped by Trinculo and Stephano, and with little role in this emergent brave new world. Brooks 1957 production was the most traditional of these six stagings. The characterization of Caliban as a lumpy, unkempt, and cynical middle-aged hermit whose territory had been overrun inspired little critical comment. Nor did it contribute to any changed perception of Caliban. If the 1957 Tempest was most typical of the way in which the London and Stratford theater staged Shakespeare, Brooks 1968 variation on themes from The Tempest was, by far, the most experimental. Among the contributions that this production made to later performances of Shakespeare were the changes that it brought to future interpretations of the character of Caliban. Brook emphasized Calibans physical power, stressing it far more than his enslavement. As a result of the corrupt and immoral lessons and examples he had been exposed to by Prospero, Caliban had been taught to use his great strength for cruel and improper means. Although a monster, Caliban seemed to be justied in his rebellious and violent behavior. The portrayal was, in many ways, a reection of the tumultuous political turmoil of the late sixties. Despite the fact that few people actually saw the Roundhouse
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Tempest and few reviewers wrote about the production during its brief run, it nevertheless has been credited with chart[ing] the way to new interpretations of Caliban(403), like those which depicted the character as angry black militant. Giorgio Strehlers 1978 production included a Caliban that was a renement of the ill-dened, amorphous character who inhabited Prosperos island in his rst staging, and bore resonances of the Caliban who had emerged from Brooks 1968 experiment. Strehler claimed to have given long consideration to the character of Caliban as he proceeded to mount this production. In this staging, Caliban was a handsome black man whose dignity could not be quelled by subjugation. The production also created signicant links between Caliban and Prospero. Both characters wielded a wooden staff to invoke the magic and mystery of the island, and both reacted with violent fury at their frustration and their fate. Caliban, his face occasionally masked, moved from his interactions with Prospero to his scenes with Trinculo and Stephano as though walking a narrow path between savagery and civilization, feeling out of place and manipulated within both societies. Despite their obvious antagonism, this production also suggested a strong emotional bond between Prospero and Caliban. This attachment made their estrangement in the nal scene that much more poignant, creating strong audience sympathy for the character of Caliban. In Ninagawas 1988 Tempest, the directors adaptation of the production into a rehearsal performance by a No theater com pany converted Caliban into a kyogen character, allowing Caliban to perform the traditional function of the kyogen by humorously retelling the storys main plot. Ninagawas chief contribution to the performance history of The Tempest was his success in amalgamating the No performance space and tradition to the play, and then connecting the poignancy of the conclusion of the play to the history of the No theater pioneer, Zeami. Thus, the production used Calibans subplot with Trinculo and Stephano as a comic reworking of The Tempests themes of usurpation and betrayal. However, by limiting Caliban to this comedic construct, he was also stripped of all danger and threat. In this production, Caliban had no connection to the worlds of colonialism and suppression; he was linked to Japan and its No performance tradition. The production illustrated the similarity between the kyogen character and the commedias zanni. In Ninagawas adaptation of The
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Tempest, Caliban, like the zanni, was not feared or reviled, but laughed at, ridiculed, and loved. In Brooks 1990 production of The Tempest, Caliban was the most contemporary character within the play. Brooks stated objective was to imbue Caliban with the ferocity, danger, and rebelliousness of a 1990s teenager. Some critics saw his demeanor and attitude as parallel to that of the rowdy, unemployed English and European youths who drunkenly riot at football matches. Brook further contemporized Calibans fate by equating his situation with Prospero to modern homelessness. This was emphasized by the conversion of Calibans cell into the cardboard box of todays urban homeless. While the remainder of this staging of The Tempest resembled a timeless African folk legend, Caliban stood apart in his postmodern close-cropped haircut and angry young man mien, as a discounted and undervalued commodity upon the contemporary international marketplace. This Caliban became a representation of the bitter fruit of the materialist excesses of the 1980s.
Despite their parallel professional careers, Peter Brook and Giorgio Strehler were very different personalities. Brook begins his rehearsals, discussions, and criticisms by forming his company of actors into a circle. Strehler often began his rehearsals by delivering a two-hour lecture/demonstration on some aspect of performance theory or history. Protective of his actors, Brook prohibits outsiders from observing his rehearsal process. Constantly in quest of an audience, Strehler insisted that his rehearsals become open-houses, and they became, in fact, public performances. However, Strehler and Brook were alike in their discerning directorial eye. Alain Maratrat, for many years a member of Brooks Paris-based CICT company, said that the collective circle which opens Brooks rehearsals becomes a living organism over a period of time, with actors presenting dramatic choices and options. Ultimately, however, the choosing from among those proposals always falls to Brook. As Maratrat explains, He has the eye, you know (Croyden, Peter Brook Creates a Nine-Hour Epic, 44). Similarly, Richard Trousdell, in his study of Strehler in rehearsal, wrote that Strehler played many conicting roles while
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working with his company of actors: teacher, the genial host, clown, victim, mocker, social conscience, great man, [and] blind idiot. Yet, the one most important purpose which Strehler served in his capacity as director was that of a human camera observing and storing away everything that was accomplished (Sachs, Giorgio Strehler in Rehearsal, 68). In an article concerning the directorial practices of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Muza wrote that Unlike a written text . . . a directors work is an abstraction that exists only in and through historical inquiry (15). Through the process of this historical inquiry the one most cogent denominator which connects Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Yukio Ninagawa, relates to the visual acuity which scenic writers/directors emphasize. The words that best relate to these directors work during their rehearsal processes, and which become manifest in their staged productions, are terms which are optically related: eye, camera, visionary, overseer, provider of insight. Brook, Ninagawa, and Strehler were primarily using their visual sense to cull what is productive and exciting from the options that their playwright, actors, and technical staff presented. In appraising yet another late-twentieth-century production of The Tempest, George Wolfes 1995 Central Park staging, which featured Patrick Stewart as Prospero, Christa Worthington marveled at the hold nothing back technical virtuosity of Wolfes staging. Yet, she might have been describing all these true preservers of Prosperos magical art when she wrote:
The director could be a boy in a sandbox, but hes really more like God. (Worthington, On Shakespeares Odd Island, a Place for Puppetry, sec. 2, 5)
I feel the cynical urge to amend this sentence to: While the director of The Tempest often behaves like a God, he is actually merely the boy in the sandbox. The Tempest provides the director with the text, the characters, and the technical challenges to play theatrical God while still remaining eternally a child, playing at the improvisational game of What if . . . ?
Appendix
THE TEMPEST (PETER BROOKS 1957 PRODUCTION)
Directed and designed by: Peter Brook Incidental Music by: Peter Brook, Michael Northen, Kegan Smith, and William Blezard Choreography by: Raimonda Orselli Produced by Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon-Avon Premiere: 13 August 1957 (Production moved for seven weeks to Londons Drury Lane, 5 December 1957)
Cast
Prospero Alonzo Antonio Gonzalo Sebastian Ferdinand Ariel Caliban Trinculo Stephano Miranda John Gielgud Robert Harris Mark Dignam Cyril Luckham Robin Lloyd Richard Johnson Brian Bedford Alec Clunes Clive Revill Patrick Wymark Dorren Aris
Reviews of Brooks 1957 Production of The Tempest

Brahms, Caryl. Moneys Worth. Drama, September 1958. Byrne, Muriel St. Clare. The Shakespeare Scene at The Old Vic, 1957 1958 and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1958. Shakespeare Quarterly 8 (August 1958). Darlington, W. A. Daily Telegraph (London), 14 August 1957 and 14 December 1957. Hobson, Harold. Sunday Times (London), 18 August 1957.
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171
Keown, Eric. Punch, 21 August 1957. Lambert, J. W. Plays in Performance. Drama (Spring 1958): 1617. Matthews, Harold. Theatre World 53, no. 393 (October 1957): 1216. (With photos). Pope, W. MacQueen. Morning Telegraph, 27 August 1957 and 14 December 1957. Schulman, Milton. London Evening Star, 14 August 1957. Trewin, J. C. Illustrated London News, 24 August 1957 and 21 December 1957 Tynan, Kenneth. Island Fling. Observer (London), 18 August 1957 Walker, Roy. Unto Caesar: A Review of Recent Productions. Shakespeare Survey 11:12835 Watt, David. Spectator, 13 December 1957; Times (London), 14 August 1957, and 6 December 1957.

Co-directed by: Peter Brook and Clifford Williams. Setting and costumes by: Abdelkader Farrah Music by: Raymond Leppard Produced by: Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford Premiere: 2 April 1963.
Cast
Prospero Caliban Miranda Ariel Trinculo Stephano Alonzo Sebastian Antonio Ferdinand Gonzalo Tom Fleming Roy Doltrice Philippa Urquhart Ian Holm David Warner Derek Smith John Welsh Donald Sinden Nicholas Selby Ian McCulloch Ken Wynne
Reviews of Brooks 1963 production of The Tempest

Barnes, Clive. Shakespeare Fete in England Opens with The Tempest. New York Times, 3 April 1963, 43
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APPENDIX
Plays in Pictures: Stratford-on-Avon Season. Theatre World 59, no. 461 (June 1963). (With photos). Times (London), 3 April 1963.

Directed by: Peter Brook, with assistance by Geoffrey Reeves and Vittorio Garcia. Environment designed by: Jean Morot. Performed at: The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London Premiere: 18 July 1968 (Production only ran until 21 July 1968)
Cast
An international group including: Ariel Ferdinand Prospero Sycorax Caliban Yoshi Oida Bob Lloyd Ian Hogg Ronnie Gilbert Barry Stanton
And Natasha Parry, Sylvain Corthay, Philippe Avron, Pierre Jorris, and Bernadette Ouffroy
Reviews of Brooks 1968 Production

Bryden, Ronald. Observer, 21 July 1968. Coleman, Terry. Guardian, 19 July 1968. Hobson, Harold. The Standard, 21 July 1968. Kingston, Jeremy. Punch, 31 July 1968. The Stage and Television Today, 18 July 1968, 1. Wardle, Irving. The Times, 19 July 1968, and 27 July 1968
LA TEMPETE (PETER BROOKS 1990 PRODUCTION)
Directed by: Peter Brook ` Translated into French by: Jean-Claude Carriere.
APPENDIX
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Sets and costumes by: Chloe Obolensky Lighting by: Jean Kalman Music by: Harue Momoyama, Mahmoud Tabrizi, and Toshi Tsuchitori. Produced at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris, beginning 27 September 1990; in Zurich 1422 September 1990; in Braunschweig 811 November 1990; at the Tramway Theatre, Glasgow, beginning 31 October 1990, at the 45th Festival dAvignon, 1991, at the Wiener Festspiele, 22 May 1991, at the Piccolo Teatro Studio of Milan, 2530 July 1991, and at Giardino Giusti in Verona, 48 August 1991.
Cast
Caliban Ariel Prospero Miranda Trinculo Ship Master Boatswain Alfonso Sebastian Antonio Gonzalo Ferdinand Stephano The Spirits The Goddesses Musicians David Bennent Bakary Sangare Sotigui Kouyate Shantala Malhar-Shivalingappa or Romane Bohringer Bruce Myers Pierre Lacan Jean-David Bashung Georges Corraface Jean-Paul Denizon Mamadou Dioume Yoshi Oida Ken Higelin Alain Maratrat Pierre Lacan and Tapa Sudama Yoshi Oida, Tapa Sudana, and Pierre Lacan Harue Momoyama (vocals) Mahmoud Tabrizi-Zadeh (dulcimer and kamantches) Toshi Tsuchitori (percussions)
Reviews of Brooks 199091 Production of La Tempete

Accettella, Simona. Il Giornale, 23 October 1990. Almansi, Guido. Panorama, 30 September 1990. Bertani, Odoardo. Avvenire, 27 June 1991. Bentivoglio, Leonetta. Il Venerdi di Repubblica, no. 178 (5 July 1991): 94100. Boquet, Guy. CahiersE 39 (April 1991): 9496. (With photo). Brandolin, Mario. Messsaggero Veneto (Udine), 29 June 1991. Carlson, Marvin A. Western European Stages 2, no. 2 (1990): 1920.
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Cesarale, Sandra. Quigiovani, 5 July 1991. Cirio, Rita. LEspresso, 4 November 1990 and 25 August 1991. Colomba, Sergio. Il Resto del Carlino (Bologna), 27 June 1991. Colonnelli, Lauretta. PiuBella, 6 July 1991. Cournet, Michel. Le Monde, 13 October 1990, 13. Croyden, Margeret. Village Voice, 12 February 1991. (With photo). Cumani, Claudio. Il Resto del Carlino (Bologna), 25 June 1991. DAmico, Masolino. La Stampa, 27 June 1991. Dapporto, Elena. La Gazzetta di Firenze (Florence), 17 October 1990. Gatta, Costanza. La Notte, 29 June 1991. Goy-Blanquet, Dominique. Times Literary Supplement, 19 October 1990, 1129. Hoyle, Martin. Times (London), 2 November 1990. Kustow, Michael. Observer (London), 14 October 1990, 57. Longatti, Alberto. La Provincia (Como), 27 June 1991. Manzoni, Franco. Corriere Della Sera, 25 June 1991. Macmillan, Joyce. Guardian, 2 November 1990. Mazella, Gianni. Il Manifesto, 27 February 1991. Miller, Judith G. Western European Stages 3, no. 2 (1991): 1114. Minotti, Rossella. Il Giorno, 25 June 1991. Nadotti, Maria. Artforum 30, no. 4 (1991): 2021. Paganini, Paulo. La Notte, 25 June 25 1991, and 26 June 1991. ` Pasero, Roberta. Il Giornale, 25 June 1991. Pensa, Carlo Maria. Famiglia Cristiana, 17 July 1991. Peter, John. Sunday Times (London), 4 November 1990. Pullini, Giorgio. La Nuova Venezia (Venice), 6 July 1991. Quadri, Franco. La Repubblica, 21 September 1990, and 27 June 1991. Raboni, Giovanni. Corriere Della Sera, 27 June 1991, 31. Ravazzin, Luciano. LArena, 6 July 1991. Reggiani, Lorenzo. LArena, 25 June 1991. Rigotti, Domenico. Avvenire, 25 June 1991. Ronfani, Ugo Ronfani. Il Giorno, 29 June 1991. Rosatti, Carlo. Il Giornale (Rome), 10 July 1991. ` Sadowska-Guillon, Irene. Jeu (Montreal), 60 (1991): 58. Savin, Janet. Shakespeare Bulletin, 10, no. 2 (1992): 2022. Servin, Micheline. Temps moderne 537 (1991): 22830. Solis, Rene. Liberation, 12 October 1990. Spinato, Giampaolo. La Repubblica, 25 June 1991. Taylor, Paul. Independent, 2 November 1990, 16. Trombetta, Sergio. Panorama, 16 June 1991. Turi, Antonio. Gazzetta del Mezzo-Giorno (Bari), 27 June 1991. Valli, Ugo. Casella Postale (Milan), 30 June 1991. Wallace, Neil. Scotland on Sunday, 28 October 1990. Wardle, Irving. Independent on Sunday, 4 November 1990, 24. Zefferi, Paolo. Corriere Della Sera, 20 June 1991, 2930.
APPENDIX
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THE TEMPEST: A REHEARSAL OF A NO PLAY ON THE ISLAND OF SADO. (NINAGAWAS PRODUCTION)
Directed by: Yukio Ninagawa Translated by: Yushi Odashima. Sets by: Toshiaki Suzuki Costumes by: Lily Komine Lighting by: Tamotsu Harada Music by: Ryudo Uzaki Produced by: The Toho Company in Japanese at the Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, 1721 August 1988. Revived at the Barbican Theatre, London, 35 December 1992.
Cast
Prospero Miranda Ariel Caliban Antonio Alonso Sebastian Ferdinand Gonzalo Trinculo Stephano Haruhiko Jo Yuko Tanaka Yoji Matsuda Yutaka Matsushige Takeshi Wakamatsu Kazunaga Tsuji Kazuhisa Seshimo Hisashi Hatakeyama Tatsumi Aoyama Kenichi Ishii Goro Daimon
Reviews of Ninagawas 1988 The Tempest

Billington, Michael. Guardian, 19 August 1988, 24. Farrell, Joe. Plays and Players, October 1988, 1720. (With photo). Gore-Langton, Robert. Listener, 1 September 1988, 34. Kemp, Peter. Independent, 19 August 1988, 18. Orr, John. London Review, October 1988, 3233. Peter, John. Sunday Times (London), 21 August 1988, C7. Ratcliffe, Michael. Observer (London). 19 August 1988. Wardle, Irving. Times (London). 19 August 1988, 16.
Reviews of Ninagawas 1992 The Tempest

Billington, Michael. Guardian, 5 December 1992, 26. Butler, Robert. Independent on Sunday, 6 December 1992.
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De Jongh, Nicholas. Evening Standard, 4 December 1992, 7. Nightingale, Benedict. Times (London), 5 December 1992, 14. Taylor, Paul. Independent, 5 December 1992, 30. Tinker, Jack. Daily Mail, 4 December 1992.
MACBETH (NINAGAWAS 1985 PRODUCTION)

Directed by: Yukio Ninagawa Translated by: Yushi Odashama Sets by: Kappa Senoh Costumes by: Jusaburo Tsujimara Lighting by: Sumio Yoshii Music by: Masato Kahi Choreography by: Kinnosuke Hanayagi Sound by: Akira Honma Stage Combat by: Mashiro Kunii Produced by: The Toho Co., Japan, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, August 1985. Revived in September 1987 at the Lyttleton Theatre, London. Revived again at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 1990.
Reviews of Ninagawas 1985 Macbeth

Berkowitz, Gerald M. Shakespeare Bulletin, 4, no. 1 (JanuaryFebruary 1986): 16. . Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 227. Brennan, Mary. Drama 159 (1986): 38. Christiansen, Richard. Chicago Tribune, 12 September 1985, 10F.

Edwards, Christopher. Spectator, 26 September 1987, 4546. Gordon, Giles. Plays and Players, November 1987, 1819. (With photos). James, John. Times Educational Supplement, 25 September 1987, 1253. Taylor, Paul. Independent, 19 September 1987, 9. Wardle, Irving. Times (London), 19 September 1987, 20.

Franks, Glenda. Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 39799. Hornby, Richard. Hudson Review 44 (199192): 10512. Kliman, Bernice W. Shakespeare Bulletin 9, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 2728.
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LA TEMPESTA (STREHLERS 1948 PRODUCTION)

Directed by: Giorgio Strehler Translated by: Salvatore Quasimodo Music by: Fiorenzo Carpi (based on Domenico Scarlatti) Choreography by: Rosita Lupi Settings by: Gianni Ratto Costumes by: Ebe Colciaghi Produced by: Piccolo Teatro for Maggio Musicale Fiorentio at Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy Premiere: 6 June 6 1948
Cast
Prospero Alfonso Antonio Gonzalo Sebastian Ferdinand Ariel Caliban Trinculo Stephano Miranda The Captain The Boatswain Camillo Pilotto Mario Feliciani Gianni Santuccio Edoardo Toniolo Nino Manfredi Giorgio De Lullo Lilla Brignone Marcello Moretti Vittorio Caprioli Antonio Batistella Luisa Rossi Carlo DAngelo Ettore Gaipa
Reviews of Strehlers 1948 La Tempesta

Bemporad, Giovanna. Il Mattino del Popolo (Venice), June 1948. Bernardelli, Francesco. La Stampa (Turin), 8 June 1948. Bonelli, Luigi. Cronache Nuove (Rome), 20 June 1948. Bucciolini, Giulio. La Nazione, 7 June 1948. Calendoli, Giovanni. La Republica dItalia, 9 June 1948. Capitani, Berto. Il Popolo (Rome), 8 June 1948. Castello, Giulio Cesare. Sipario (Milan), June 1948, 23. Cial, Mario. Il Popolo (Milan), 8 June 1948. Damerini, Adelmo. Avanti! (Rome), 8 June 1948. DAmico, Silvio. Il Tempo (Rome), 8 June 1948. De Cecco, Bruno. LArena, (Verona), 9 June 1948. Del Basso, Glauco. Ultimissime (Trieste), 5 June 1948.
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Gazzaniga, Rodolfo. Il Giornale DItalia (Rome), 8 June 1948. Graziani, A. Il Tirreno (Livorno), 13 June 1948. Magli, Adriano. LAvvenire dItalia (Bologna), 13 June 1948. Moretti, R. M. Sempre Avanti (Torino), 28 May 1948. Paccino, Dario. Avanti! (Milan), 5 June 1948 and 8 June 1948. Pavolini, Corrado. Fiera Letteroria, 13 June 1948. Petriccione, Federico. Tempo (Milan), June 1948. Pierantoni, Antonio. Il Mattime dellItalia Centraio (Florence), 5 June 1948. Radice, Raul. LEuropeo (Milan), 13 June 1948. Romano, Sergio. Il Lavoro Nuovo (Genoa), 14 September 1948. ` Schacherl, Bruno. LUnita, 3 June 1948 . Biennale di Venezia, 8 June 1948. Simoni, Renato. Corriere della Sera (Milan), 7 June 1948. Tosi, Virgilio. Vie Nuove Via Delle Bottegne Oscure (Rome), 27 June 1948. Tranquilli, Vittorio. Giornale di Trieste, 8 June 1948. Trevisani, Giulio. LUnita (Turin), 9 June 1948. Troiani, Ferruccio. Film (Milan), 28 June 1948. Valli, Romolo. Da Reggio Democratica (Reggio Emilia), 10 June 1948.
LA TEMPESTA (STREHLERS 1978 PRODUCTION)

Directed by: Giorgio Strehler Translated by: Agostino Lombardo Music by: Fiorenzo Carpi Sets and Costumes by: Luciano Damiani Choreography and Mime by: Marisa Flach Produced by: the Piccolo Teatro di Milano at Teatro Lirico, in Milan Premiere: 28 June 1978. Production remained in repertory for several years touring Western Europe, the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival (1 June12 August 1984) and the Pepsico Summerfare on the campus of SUNY, Purchase, N.Y., 2528 July 1984.
Cast
Prospero Alonso Antonio Gonzalo Sebastian Ferdinand Tino Carraro Claudio Gora Osvaldo Ruggieri Mario Carraro Luciano Virgilio Massimo Bonetti
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Ariel Caliban Trinculo Stephano Miranda
Giulia Lazzerini Michele Placido Armando Mara Mimmo Craig Fabiana Udenio

Armstrong, George. Guardian, 12 August 1978. Bertani, Odoardo. Avvenire, 30 June 1978. Bonino, Guido Davico. La Stampa (Turin), 30 June 1978. Borelli, Sauro. LUnita, 2 June 1978. Chiaretti, Tommaso. La Repubblica dItalia, 30 June 1978. Columba, Sergio. La Nazione (Florence), 30 June 1978. Dalla Valle, Tino. Il Resto Del Carlino (Bologna), 13 June 1978. De Monticelli, Roberto. Corriere della Sera (Milan), 24 June 1978 and 30 June 1978. Geron, Gastone. Il Giornale Nuovo (Milan), 30 June 30 1978. Greico, Giuseppe. Gente, 17 June 1978, 139. Lombardo, Agostino. LUnita, 12 July 1978. Lunari, Luigi. Avanti! 1 November 1978. Missigoi, Tiziana. LUnita (Milan), 2 June 1978 and 6 June 1978. Mutti, Roberto. Fronte Popolare, 9 July 1978. Pagliarani, Elio. Paese Sera (Rome), 30 June 1978. Pensa, Carlo Maria. Sipario 387 (August 1978). Piccoli, Fantasio. Oggi, 15 July 1978. Placido, Benjamino. La Repubblica, 25/26 June 1978. Porro, Maurizio. Corriere Della Sera, 14 June 1978. Prosperi, Giorgio. Il Tempo (Rome), 1 July 1978. Rigotti, Domenico. Avvenire, 15 June 1978. Romano, Serena. Giornale Di Sicilia (Palermo), 30 June 1978. Rota, Ornella. La Stampa (Turin), 24 June 1978. ` Sanguineti, Edoardo. LUnita, 30 June 1978. Serenellini, Mario. Gazzetta Del Popolo (Turin), 30 June 1978. Tian, Renzo. Il Messagero, 30 June 1978. Vatteroni, Chiara. Il Piccolo (Trieste), 1 July 1978. Ventavoli, Lorenzo. Giornale Dello Spettacolo (Rome), 8 July 1978. Vigorelli, Giancarlo. Il Giorno, 24 June 1978 and 30 June 1978. Volli, Ugo. La Repubblica, 25/26 June 1978.

Bernard, Rene. LExpress, 10/11 April 1983. Bevacqua, Stefano. Il Messaggero, 8 November 1983.
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Billington, Michael. Guardian (London), 16 November 1983. Brovia, Tiziana. Il Carbiniere (Rome), January 1984, 77. Cappelli, Valerio. Corriere Della Sera, 8 January 1984. Chalais, Francois. France-Soir, 11 November 1983. Charetti, Tommaso. La Repubblica (Rome), 27 November 1983. Costaz, Gilles. Le Matin de Paris, 4 November 1983. De Chiara, Ghigo. Avanti! (Rome), 27/28 November 1983. De Monticelli, Roberto. Corriere Della Sera (Milan), 17 January 1984. Dumur, Guy. Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 13 November 1983. Fei, Sandra. Il Giornale, 8 November 1983. Fillipino, Gabriella. Gazzetta Ticinese (Lugano), 3 March 1984. Godard, Colette. Le Monde (Paris), 8 November 1983 Heliot, Armelle. Le Quotidien de Paris, 7 November 1983 Henrichs, Von Benjamin. Die Zeit (Hamburg), 11 November 1983 Holden, Stephen. New York Times, 27 July 1984. Isorni, Benoit. La Repubblica (Rome), 6/7 November 1983. Klausner, Emmanuelle. La Croix, 15 November 1983. Leonardini, Jean-Pierre. LHumanite, 8 November 1983. Lerrant, Jean-Jacques. Le Progres, 11 November 1983. Locchi, Giorgio. Il Tempo (Rome), 10 November 1983. Lubrano, Michele. Il Mattino (Naples), 5 November 1983. Marcabru, Pierre. Le Figaro (Paris), 7 November 1983. Maximilien, Jo. Le Nouveau Journal, 15 November 1983. Novazio, Emanuele. La Stampa, 5 November 1983. Nightingale, Benedict. New York Times, 5 August 1984. Pancaldi, Augusto. LUnita, 9 November 1983. Perret, Marion D. Shakespeare Bulletin 2, no. 11 (SeptemberOctober 1984): 89. Polacco, Giorgio. Il Piccolo, 11 March 1984 Poulet, Jacques. LEvolution, 11 November 1983. Romani, Paolo. La Nazione (Florence), 2 November 1983 and 9 November 1983 Ronfani, Ugo. Il Giorno, 3 November 1983. Sala, Rita. Papirorosa (Bari), January 1984. Savioli, Aggeo. LUnita (Rome), 27 November 1983. Scorrano, Osvaldo. Corriere del Giorno (Taranto), 3 January 1983. Siciliano, Enzo. Corriere Della Sera (Milan), 27 November 1983. Sogliuzzo, A. Richard. Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 1078. Solomon, Alissa. Village Voice (New York), 7 August 1984, 8687. Sullivan, Dan. Los Angeles Times, 9 July 1984. Thibaudat, Jean-Pierre. Liberation, 13 November 1983. Tian, Renzo. Il Messaggero, 27 October 1983. Torresani, Sergio. La Provincia (Cremona), 24 June 1984. Verdot, Guy. La Nouvelle Re publique du Centre-Ouest, 13 November 1983.
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181
Warren, Roger. Times Literary Supplement (London), 9 March 1984, 248. Wiegand, Wilfried. Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung 22 November 1983. Zanolli, Vittoriano. La Provincia (Cremona), 24 June 1984. Zazza, Sara. Il Secolo dItalia (Rome), 29 November 1983.
Notes
CHAPTER 1. THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST
1. Besides his three productions of The Tempest which this study analyzes (and the staging which he codirected with Clifford Williams), Peter Brook has directed King John, Loves Labors Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure (twice), The Winters Tale, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet (three times), King Lear, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra. In addition to his two stagings of The Tempest, Giorgio Strehler directed productions of Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, his adaptation of Henry VI (twice), and King Lear. Yukio Ninagawa began his directing career more than twenty-ve years after Brook and Strehler, and his catalog of Shakespeare productions is more limited. Since the mid-1970s, besides The Tempest, he has staged Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Nights Dream. It may be noted that all three directors have staged productions of Romeo and Juliet. The fact that all have directed both The Tempest and King Lear, however, might be more telling. As Aviv Orani has observed, both Lear and The Tempest are plays viewed from the perspective of an older man painfully observing the rise of the new world (Italian Directors, 300). 2. Henry Beerbohm Tree also expressed this notion that the modern age could best extract The Tempests full potential. In 1904, in the program notes to his production of The Tempest, Tree wrote that of all Shakespeares works, The Tempest is the one which most demands the aids of modern stagecraft (cited by Orgel in Tempest, 74). 3. Giorgio Strehler deconstructed the Meyerholdian triangle of actor, author, and director around the character of Prospero. Strehler observed that:
Prospero is himself a father and a man, a Duke, a colonizer, and a magician. But, above all, he is a dramaturg, a director, and an actor. (Lombardo, Strehler e Shakespeare, 21)
4. This plot device closely parallels that of Calderons 1635 Spanish Golden Age classic, Life is a Dream. 5. Perhaps there is cause for some hope. The recently published Arden Shakespeare (3rd series) King Lear, edited by R. A. Foakes, does acknowledge the signicance of Giorgio Strehlers 1972 Italian-language staging of the play. And Christine Dymkowskis The Tempest, for the Cambridge University Presss Shakespeare in Production series (2000), details much of the stage business of the Strehler and Ninagawa productions.
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CHAPTER 2. GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

1. For my descriptions of the physical structure of the 1948 production, I am indebted to the photographs and the original scenographers renderings of Gianni Ratto, which I was permitted to view and photocopy during my visit to the Piccolo Teatro in January of 1994. I particularly wish to acknowledge the wonderfully good-spirited cooperation of Franco Viespro of the Piccolo Teatros Historical Archives Department. 2. Ettore Gaipa played the boatswain in the 1948 production of The Tempest. He has also written a biography of Strehler (Giorgio Strehler, published by Capelli in 1959). Most signicant for the purposes of my research, Gaipa wrote an unpublished account of the 1948 production La Tempesta 1948 a Boboli. The Piccolo Theater generously provided me with a copy of this eight-page description, which proved to be the single most valuable resource for attempting to reconstruct the performance. 3. Salvatore Quasimoto served the 1948 production of The Tempest in two curiously opposing capacities. He provided the translation for the production and later reviewed the production (Tempesta in Una Vasca: Al Giardino di Boboli: Shakespeare Tradotto da Quasimodo) for Bis (Milan), on 15 June 1948. 4. Looking back upon the 1948 production, Strehler had serious misgivings about both the physical look and the characterization of Caliban. Strehler was particularly critical of Calibans lack of restless desperation (Inscenare Shakespeare, 21). 5. Salvatore Quasimoto quibbled at this. In his review for Bis, he argued that Stephanos Neapolitan dialect was actually Pugliese. 6. In Strehler E Shakespeare, Strehler says, Prospero is himself father, man, duke, colonizer, and magicianbut, above all, he is dramaturg, director, and actor (Lombardo, 21). 7. The costuming for Ferdinand and Miranda (played by Giorgio De Lullo and Luisa Rossi, respectively) for this scene indicated careful consideration. The copy of the 1948 program provided by the Piccolo Theatre included costume designer Ebe Colchiaghis sketches of Ferdinand and Miranda in the costumes they wore for this scene. As they watched the masque unfold, Ferdinand wore a high-collared jacket, a tufted, striped codpiece, stenciled tights, and owing robe. Mirandas hair was bound with laurels, a motif which was continued in her laurel studded oor-length gown. Salvatore Quasimoto described these costumes as Renaissance inspired, constructed meticulously by Florentine, Milanese, and Roman tailors speeding against the production deadlines. Castello mentioned the harmony and similarity in the shades of blue of their respective costumes. 8. Perhaps this was what Strehler was striving for. It was Quasimotos contention that Prospero was a grave and solemn character, one who ees from lightness. Quasimoto saw Prospero as reviling humanity with his wand, because the spirit of vendetta had so claimed him.
CHAPTER 3. PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

1. There is a markedly similar episode in Ingmar Bergmans personal history. Bergman recounts:
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. . . I was fourteen. I had a well-equipped (and large) puppet theater which I had constructed together with my best friend . . . It was a rather advanced contraption with a revolving stage, side stage, cyclorama and an intricate lighting system. Our biggest success had been Maeterlincks Bluebird . . . the coming season was to include . . . The Magic Flute and The Winters Tale. (quoted in Salander, When Do You Quit, Ingmar, 12)
2. The similarity between Komisarjevsky and Brook (at least at this early stage of Brooks career) extended to their directorial philosophies as well. In Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, John Gross observed that Komisarjevsky:
believed that the old actor-manager tradition was incurably bourgeois and individualistic in its values; his mission was to replace it with uid, irreverent productions governed by the guiding hand of the director rather than the vanity of the leading player. He also thought of the theater as a vehicle for social criticism. (192)
3. Sally Beauman wrote that Brook sought for a keynote to each play (Royal Shakespeare Company, 183), but this tends to minimize Brooks propensity (even early on) for experimentation and research, and his willingness to admit to not knowing all the answers. In Great Directors at Work, David Richard Jones wrote of Brook that: He encouraged looseness of staging and interpretation until very late in the rehearsal process(204). 4. In Brooks introduction to Christopher Frys translation of Anouilhs Ring around the Moon, he described a structure where the scenes are linked like the words of a poem. 5. Ariane Mnouchkine was to use a similar effect in her Asian-inuenced 1984 production of Henry IV, Part 1. In act 5, scene 4, when Prince Hal saved his father from Douglas, Mnouchkine used red yarn extending from Douglass mouth to indicate the owing of his blood. 6. J. C. Trewin of The Illustrated London News reviewed the production both at Stratford and at Drury Lane. He maintained that: various small things have been altered for the better on the passage to Drury Lane. In Stratford, Trewin saw much of the production, particularly the storm and masque scenes, as tentative. Trewin described an improved uidity from the storm scene into the landing upon Prosperos island, and referred to the improvements in the masque as transformation. 7. Keown called it executive gray. This suggests an image of Prospero as the man in the gray-anneled toga, a most interesting and apt choice for a mid-twentieth-century Prospero. 8. Gielgud wrote: I conceived Prospero as a sort of El Greco hermit with very short hair: I was naked to the waist and had bare legs (Acting Shakespeare, 109). J. C. Trewin called Gielguds Prospero: a sombre, erect man of grizzled middle age. In The Play on Stage section of the introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Tempest, Stephen Orgel referred to Gielguds portrayal as an introspective and obsessive Prospero, isolated and brooding on his wrongs (83). David L. Hirst, in The Tempest: Text and Performance, underlined the hermitlike, religious connection, describing Gielguds Prospero as a biblical anchorite . . . Brooks conception of the work as rst and foremost a revenge play, and Gielguds presentation of the agony of a tortured saint, were innovative and inuential (46). David William noted that Gielguds
NOTES
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performance offered an exemplary re-assessment of the character. Ascetic, wiry, and middle-aged in appearance, he admirably combined the three identities of father, duke, and magician (The Tempest on the Stage, 152). 9. Orgel wrote: Brook made the play a projection of Prosperos inner world, with cavernous settings and overgrown, tangled vegetationa dream world, but as The Times critic put it, the kind of dream King Lear would have had (Introduction to The Tempest, 83). 10. Brian Bedford was barely twenty-two years old at the time of the production, and quite new to Shakespearean verse. His connection to Brooks production of The Tempest came about as a result of his involvement in Brooks staging of A View from the Bridge. Brook asked Bedford to join his company for the production of The Tempest, going so far as inviting him to choose his role. In retrospect, Bedford regrets that he did not elect to play Ferdinand. In the far more challenging role of Ariel, Bedford now feels he was completely overmatched. Bedford speaks of how daunting working with Gielgud was, the impossible task of trying to act on stage alongside a theatrical icon. Brook asked Gielgud to work with Bedford in order for the young actor to become comfortable and familiar with the poetry of the play. Bedford still recounts with awe Gielguds mastery of the verse, and that now, more than forty years later, when Bedford performs Prospero as part of his own one-man show, he does not disguise the fact that his delivery is a conscious/unconscious memory of Gielgud delivering those same soliloquies. 11. In several of the production photographs there appears to be a curious three-leafed headpiece on the back of Ariels head. In another painterly reference, M. St. Clare Byrne wrote: His [Ariels] edges were fuzzy with light, like some being drawn by Fuseli or Blake, and the way he was made to look insubstantial while Prospero looked contrastingly solid, when they were in close juxtaposition was very remarkable (Review of 1957 Tempest, 508). 12. David L. Hirst noted that Gielguds Prospero was a hard man, manifesting little kindness or parental affection and taking little joy in his magical powers (The Tempest: Text and Performance, 57). The development of a godly quality in Prospero was apparently one of the themes of the production. According to Gielgud, Brook felt that Prospero in the last act goes back to his dukedom as a kind of God (Acting in Shakespeare, 109). 13. Trewin found this setting to be quite appropriate; more so in the London remounting of December 1957 where Brook created an effective location for Prosperos sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard (4.1.69). Trewin described it as a world of elemental forces . . . [a] t home for the bold magic of Prospero (Review of 1957 Tempest, 1096). Although J. W. Lambert disliked the production, he did favor the productions ambience of chilly unease (Review of 1957 Tempest, 16). 14. Apparently, there were costume adjustments between the Stratford and London productions. Trewin, in his review of the London production, wrote that Prospero bid his farewell in a turquoise cloak. Trewin also noted that Mirandas costuming had undergone revision since Stratford. At Drury Lane freed from her sarong and unkempt dark hair she was dressed in a simple, owing palegreen gown (Review of 1957 Tempest, 1096). 15. There were also adjustments made to the masque scene on the produc-
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NOTES
tions progress from Stratford to Drury Lane. J. C. Trewin complained that at Stratford we had no hint of Iris (ibid.). 16. Trewin was further confused by the dancers intonation of the fertilityrite chant barns, garners, vines, plants. By the time the production reached Drury Lane, Trewin saw a transformation: Great Juno oats down upon a lazy cloud; and the moment when the grouped trinity is poised above the dancing nymphs and reapers is as harmonious charmingly [sic] as we could wish (ibid.). The changes in the masque scene did not, however, meet with unanimous approval. W. A. Darlington wrote: the . . . object of my particular admiration at Stratford, the masque, last night gave me no particular pleasure (Review of 1957 Tempest). 17. In his introduction to The Tempest, Stephen Orgel wrote:
From one aspect, Prosperos art is Baconian science and Neoplatonic philosophy, the empirical study of nature leading to the understanding and control of all its forces. In the Magnalia Natur, Bacon promised, as benets deriving from the new philosophy, the power to raise storms at will, to control the seasons, to accelerate germination and harvest . . . (20)
There is also an extraordinary passage in Bacons essay Of Truth, where, most Prospero-like, he writes that no pleasure is comparable to standing on the vantage ground of truth and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below (The Essays [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985], 62). 18. It was on this question that I was most anxious for Brian Bedfords help. I was particularly interested in placing the production within the context of such current turmoil as the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising. Furthermore, Brechts Berliner Ensemble had only recently visited London for the rst time. Was any of their inuence to be detected in this production? Bedfords response was the disappointing assertion that Brook wasnt working that way just yet, that this was not his political period. By the time that Brook worked on King Lear in 1962 this was not the case, and he was seeing characters from Shakespeare within the frame of reference of contemporary political and cultural gures. In a conversation with Charles Marowitz, who served as assistant director of the Lear production, Brook said:
You cant apply psychoanalysis to a character like Lear. He does it (apportions out his kingdom and steps down) because hes that type of man. Like de Gaulle or Adenauer or Citizen Kane, he has battened down all the hatches of his power. (Marowitz and Trussler, Theatre at Work, 136)
19. During my interview with Brian Bedford, I showed him a photograph of the masque scene that suggested a gure that might be Ariel in the upstage center position seemingly orchestrating the masque. I was anxious to determine if that was indeed Ariel. At rst, Bedford assured me that it was, then he quickly hedged. Oh, I thought that was the banquet scene, he said. In the banquet scene, I remember popping up on the back of the stage atop a giant toadstool.
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CHAPTER 4. PETER BROOKS EXPERIMENT: THE 1968 TEMPEST

1. Charles Marowitzs work as assistant director on Brooks production of King Lear also marks the beginning of Brooks extensive use of collaborators and assistant directors on his productions. No longer is Brook attempting control of all aspects of production. He is beginning to use his role as director to serve as production coordinator and overseer. 2. Blin was originally cast by Brook to play the role of the Bishop. Brook later decided that he wanted shorter men playing the Bishop and the Judge so they could be costumed in similar looking kothornoi. Blin thus took the role of the Envoy (Savona, Jean Genet Fifteen Years Later, 12728). 3. Brook collaborated with Clifford Williams on a production of The Tempest that opened at Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company on 2 April 1963. Like the previous years King Lear, this Tempest was inuenced by Jan Kott and was interpreted by the critics as an investigation into violence and injustice, with Caliban representing the Java man whose phallic gestures conveyed primitive mans raw sexuality (Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeares Caliban, 190). Caliban was seen as symbolic of what Robert Speaight called emergent humanity. The production was poorly received. For example, Speaight wrote:
I have no idea what division of responsibity one should have recognized . . . between Mr. Peter Brook and Mr. Clifford Williams. Perhaps Mr. Brook conceived that Mr. Williams executed. Judging from a note in the program, they seemed to have discussed it at length, and I doubt whether I should have agreed with a single word that they said . . . this was a production divided against itself. (Shakespeare in Britain, 42324)
4. The origin of this project began in 1967. Jean-Louis Barrault formed a committee of European theatrical luminaries such as Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and Helen Weigel of the Berliner Ensemble to develop a workshop during a Parisian summer arts festival to be held at the Ode on. Brook was offered the opportunity to run this workshop, but he declined, choosing instead to develop this multinational exercise around The Tempest that was then to be performed as part of the festival. 5. Other directors quickly adopted this staging concept. At the 1969 Spoleto Festival, Luca Ronconi staged Orlando Furioso using an open acting space with mobile wagons for the spectators. In both the Brook and Ronconi productions, the staging and the actor-audience relationship created some of the effects of a street parade, a happening, and medieval theater (Brockett and Findlay, Century of Innovation, 42728). 6. The inuence of commedia dellarte in The Tempest is discussed in F. Neris Scenari delle Maschere in Arcadia (1913), K. M. Leas Italian Popular Comedy (1934), Allardyce Nicolls The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia DellArte (1963), and by H. D. Gray in The Sources of The Tempest, (1920). Gray cites the scenario of a commedia dellarte piece entitled Li Tre Satiri, which includes a plot between a native islander and two Europeans to usurp a magicians power by stealing his book. The magician eventually
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thwarts their plan. Pantaloncino, which includes a magician throwing away his staff and book, The Strangers, where shipwrecked clowns carry a bottle around, and are consistently inebriated, Pazzia, in which the Gratiano character discovers another character hiding beneath a cloth, much like Trinculos discovery of Caliban, and a commedia scenario cited by Lea, entitled Il Capriccio where there is a banquet which rises from the ground and is snatched away as suddenly by spirits are other possible commedia sources (1. 209). 7. The ve performances of The Tempest were barely acknowledged in the daily London newspapers. Where it was acknowledged, it was derided. One critic called it Peter Brooks tumultuous and bizarre experiment (Hobson, 21 July 1968). 8. Christopher Innes argues persuasively that Caliban and Prospero also need to be perceived as mirrors. Innes describes them as:
. . . complementary aspects of a single personality with This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine as the central motif, and the intellectual, spiritual aspect of the mind losing control of the atavistic, instinctual Caliban. So the performance became an exploration of the anarchic and primitive side of human nature . . . Caliban led a mass revolution, raping Miranda and then sexually assaulting Prospero, but this dark side of sexuality was balanced against an innocent paradise of pre-civilized responses to nature, in which the nal marriage ceremony was performed as a tribal mating ritual. (Avant Garde Theatre, 132)
The suggestion of Prospero and Caliban as alter egos did not extend to their physical appearance. For this production of The Tempest, Prospero is extremely young looking. He is by far the most youthful Prospero in this survey. This vigor is heightened by his costume of a white karate suit. 9. Brook, who is usually guarded and secretive about his rehearsal practices, directed a half-hour documentary lm entitled Peter Brook: The Tempest. The lm begins with a statement by Brook and then proceeds to show performance and rehearsal footage of The Tempest experiment. It was an invaluable resource for the purposes of this chapter. 10. I posed this in the form of a question to Yoshi Oida, asking him, in effect, why Brook thought that the Asian actor was more capable of this bringing of magic. Oida said that he thought that it was the difference between working from the inside, from the body, as he had been trained, as opposed to working from the outside, from the brain, which is predominantly a product of Western actor training. Oida believed that it was his ability to focus from the inside, and perhaps most signicantly, to use his physical body rather than the Stanislavskian approach of seeking for the appropriate mental personalization that Brook was looking for, and that Oida was capable of delivering (personal interview, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1 April 1995). 11. Brooks very rst statement in the lm was: I start from the deep belief that theatre is rotten. He then stated his belief that The Tempest was an enormous challenge, calling it the richest, most enigmatic, difcult play he knew. The Tempest was to be used as raw material in this experiment. The company of actors was to draw from the plays problems, not to stage the play. Brook enumerated magic, dreams, ambition, power, violence, and hate, not only as The
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Tempests themes, but what he called its journalistic abstractions. These themes and abstractions were then to become the productions raw material. 12. When Ferdinand rst appeared upon the island, his role as mirror of Caliban was heightened by his own violent birth onto this brave new world. He washed up onto the island writhing upon the ground and appearing in great physical and emotional torment. 13. In an interview with Ronald Hayman, Brook acknowledged: The Tempest exercises in one way were everything were doing in the Dream or directly related to the Dream, which is a pure extension of that work (Playback, 45).
CHAPTER 5. GIORGIO STREHLER, 1978

1. Strehler also mounted a production of Richard II that premiered at the Piccolo Teatro on Shakespeares birthday, 23 April 1948. 2. While Strehler had a proclivity for remounting, retooling, and reexamining the same play several times (for example, he mounted six different productions of Goldonis The Servant of Two Masters), The Tempest was the only complete Shakespeare text that he directed more than once. 3. When I asked Tina Carraro and Giulia Lazzarini, the Prospero and Ariel in Strehlers 1978 production of The Tempest and veterans of many Strehler productions, whether their performances evolved out of the rehearsal process, or whether it seemed as though Strehler knew from the very beginning precisely how their characters were to be played, they both responded, independently, that Strehler had decided all of these things long before the rehearsal process began. 4. Brecht and Strehlers mutual admiration continued to grow right up to Brechts death in August of 1956. Early in 1956, after having watched Strehler in rehearsal, Brecht declared Strehler probably the greatest director in Europe, and granted Strehler creative authority over the Brecht canon in Italy (Trousdell, Giorgio Strehler, 65). Strehler directed productions of nine of Brechts plays in the years from 1955 to 1967. 5. Strehler often repeated the desire that his actors instill their roles with umano. In 1974, he published a series of essays titled Per un teatro umano. David Hirst writes that the Italian word umano has all the implications of human, humane, and humanitarian with their concomitant social and political overtones (Strehler, 2). 6. This title has been alternately translated as Power Games, The Game of the Mighty, or The Play of the Powerful. 7. In 1965, the framework of the production was structured as though the plays horrors were a nightmare. Afterward, Strehler felt that this had slowed down the action. The revived 1973 Il gioco dei potenti was staged as a metaphorical circus arcade which had closed down for the night. The set consisted of three separate stages resembling circus rings on which various scenes took place simultaneously (Hirst, Strehler, 73). Perhaps the most notable use of this triptych staging was the opening sequence. In the center ring the funeral of Henry V was enacted. On stage left, in a location dominated by a large tree, a group of children sang and danced. On stage right, the child Henry VI was
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being crowned. As the funeral and investiture progressed, some of the children from the stage left playing area changed their costumes, transformed from children into monsters; dwarves dressed as grownups (ibid., 73). As the funeral of Henry V concluded, the mourners brought Henry VI from his coronation ceremony onto the center ring. The costumes and the music changed abruptly from funereal to celebratory. Time sped by at an accelerated pace: the gures upon the stage aged rapidly. The left ring of the stage enacted the marriage of Henry VI. At the wedding celebration seven members of an acting troupe enacted the story of Joan of Arc while a storyteller narrated the action. 8. Prospero and Miranda did a very similar bit of stage business with Prosperos magical cloak in act 1, scene 2 of Strehlers 1978 production of The Tempest. 9. At the time of my interview with Giulia Lazzarini, Strehler had taken to acting in his own productions. In 1987, he performed in his production of Elvira, O la passione teatrale; which Lazzerini viewed as a major advancement in Strehlers late development as an actor. He also played the title role in his 1990 epic stagings of Faust I and Faust II. Lazzarini felt strongly that if Strehler had performed these roles previous to the restaging of The Tempest, he would have served as his own Prospero. 10. My account of the Strehler production of The Tempest is based upon the videotape of the production directed for the Italian national television network, RAI, by Carlo Battistoni, Strehlers assistant director for the stage production. The use of this documented record of a stage performance creates an interesting perspective on the productions extensive metatheatricality. As Pia Kleber noted:
It is interesting that the usual process seemed to be reversed: lm tends to belie the mechanisms of production, but this time the camera revealed more technical devices than the stage production did. (Theatrical Continuities, 156)
In the televised production, for example, one could see the offstage musicians and backstage technicians coordinating their efforts with those of the actors during the storm scene. 11. Rosette Lamont noted: Miranda sits between her fathers legs, enfolded in his arms. It is a gesture so tender, so nurturing that it suggests a loving mothers concern rather than paternal care. One senses that Miranda is Prosperos reason for being, and that he is her universe (Performance Notes, 56). Jan Kott did not agree. He believed that in Strehlers production, Ariel was Prosperos favorite child, that Prospero . . . has more affection for her than for Miranda (Prospero, or the Director, 136). 12. The casting of a woman in the role of Ariel is, in itself, unusual. Throughout the seventeenth century, Ariel had been designated as a male role on the English stage. In the early eighteenth century, the role of Ariel was converted into a breeches role calling for a female singer-dancer. It remained in the female domain until the 1930s, when, at least in England, it was rmly and nally established as a male role (Orgel, Tempest, 70, 77). Of the three directors and six productions of The Tempest covered here, Strehler is the only one to have employed a woman to play the role. Giulia Lazzarini described her interpretation of Ariel as not a boy, or a girl, or a child, but a spirit, a transformation, a
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fantasy . . . Ariel just is. Lazzarini dened Ariel as: a ball of air . . . a lighter than air ower. In his book The Fool and His Sceptre, William Willeford wrote:
The most usual derivation of the word [fool] is from Latin follis, a pair of bellows, a windbag. A fool is like a pair of bellows in that his words are only air, empty of meaning. The plural of the Latin follis is folles, which means puffed cheeks, whence, according to Skeat, the term was easily transferred to a jester. (Skeat, An Etymologcal Dictionary of the English Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882, entry under Fool.) Taking these derivations together, one might say that a fool looks and acts silly in various ways, such as grimacing, and that what he says is empty of meaning. This is so despite the fact that wind which bloweth where it listeth (John 3:8), is one of the most archaic representations of spirit. . . . The fool has the freedom and unpredictability of spirit, but in his show it seems to issue into mere air, a commotion of spirit with neither focus nor direction. The fools wind scatters things and meanings yet in the confusion reveals glimpses of a counterpole by spirit: nature with the purposes and intelligence of instinct, which like spirit, cannot be accommodated to rational understanding. (1011)
Lazzerinis interpretation of Ariel belonged to this theatrical tradition of both the spirit and the fool, rounded with rational acuity. The actress recounted that in Strehlers vision for The Tempest, Prospero perceived Ariel with tenderness. At the same time, Ariel regarded Prospero ambivalently. In discussing the relationship between Ariel and Prospero, Lazzarini talked of the symbiosis between the two characters. Theirs was a relationship built upon the love between the master/patron and the server. Ariel took great pleasure in being Prosperos server. Lazzarini was quite wary of using the word servant (personal interview). 13. During the rst few moments of their plotting, Ariel listened horried. David Hirst wrote:
The fact that Antonio and Stephano were left out was not the careless mistake which some directors commit when, in having Ariel perform magical waves of the hand over everyone but Antonio and Sebastian, they give the impression that Prospero has intended the conspiracy to take place. In Strehlers conception the dangers of the wicked lords were minimised: Ariel watched them carefully, intent on returning to thwart their plan. (Text and Performance, 63)
14. Strehler transposed the stage directions. Act 3, scene 3, 60s: Alon., Seb., etc, draw their swords now accompanied Alonzo and Sebastians speeches on lines 1034. 15. Alissa Solomon saw this moment as another example of the productions emphasis upon theatrical elements. Solomon noted: He shakes her hand as though greeting an actor backstage after a show (Village Voice, 7 August 1984, 87). 16. This moment was one of several where Jan Kott was in strong disagreement with Strehlers choices and interpretation of the plays stage business. Kott found fault with these commedia gures going so far in their buffo representation of Prospers plight. Kott wrote:
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Pulcinella-Trinculo will throw the royal robe over his shoulders. Capitano-Stephano will put on his crown. Strehler wanted to repeat in buffo the symbols of usurpation and regicide. But in Shakespeares dramas, or even his comedies, a royal crown has never rested on the head of a clown. In the Shakespearean scenario, only glistening rags were hung out on the line by Ariel. When the water-drenched drunkards throw themselves on these, Caliban understands he is dealing with fools. He knows that Prosperos power is in his Book. But the Book of Prospero is the Directors script. For Strehler the operatic score is more important than a royal crown. (Prospero, or the Director, 121).
This is not entirely true. Shakespeare had indeed used a precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown before. In Henry IV, Part 1, during the act 2, scene 4 mock-regal interrogation, Falstaff employed a Boars Head cushion to serve as metatheatrical coronet during his interview with Prince Hal. David Hirst made an incisive point concerning this same dramatic moment when he wrote:
. . . the repeated image of the borrowed robes, which converts Stephano into a miniMacbeth, was given a new twist. As doubles of their more dangerous corollaries, Antonio and Sebastian, they further enforced the mirror-image which is characteristic of both Shakespeare and Pirandello in their exploitation of the relationships between theatre and life. (Text and Performance, 64)
17. There is a famous medieval miniature by Jean Fouquet of a performance of Le Martyre de Sainte Apolline. In this illustration a stage director in clerical garb, with baton and production book . . . stand(s) . . . in the midst of the performers (Nagler, Source Book, 54). In this Strehler production, Prospero replicated the pose of Fouquets cleric/director. 18. For this stage moment, Prospero physically became a theater curtain in miniature. In act 1, he had ordered: The fringed curtain of thine eye advance / And say what thou seest yond (1.2.410). Here, (5.2.170) Prospero magically turned himself into just such a fringed curtain. 19. Strehler gave considerable thought to Calibans exit. When interviewed by Ralph Berry, Strehler said: Prospero gives Ariel his liberty. But what does he do with Caliban? Its a question that has always given me intense perplexity (On Directing Shakespeare, 128). In an interview with Pia Kleber, Strehler specically addressed Calibans nal moment onstage:
This was a real problem. For weeks we contemplated how we could direct Calibans exit. Should he leave the lid of his cave open or close it? In the end, we left it open, conveying the idea that Caliban does not want to have anything to do with the so-called civilized world, and crawls back into his cave, but the hole stays open, and he has the choice to come up if he wishes. This was a political decision. (Theatrical Continuities, 147)
Strehler may well have been considering this same issue of openendedness, when he said: Shakespeare always leaves the possibility of the decision with the coming generation and the society which is going to make itself. Its always
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projected to the future. The circle is never absolutely closed in itself (Berry, On Directing Shakespeare, 128). Strehlers resolution to the problem of Calibans exit again met with the disapproval of Jan Kott:
Of all the possible endings in The Tempest, Calibans return to his rock-prison seems the most false and traditional. When Prospero and the newcomers from the Old World leave the island, Caliban should remain alone on the stage: deceived twice, he is richer in experience only. (Prospero, or the Director, 122)
20. When I interviewed Giulia Lazzarini, I indicated my sense of the strange irony of this character, capable of magical ight throughout the production, having her freedom dramatized by the simple, mundane action of walking off of the stage through the audience and out the back of the house. Lazzarinis response was that Strehler was well aware of this contradiction. If it were possible to have Ariel y to her freedom without the use of any wires, Strehler would have done so. Symbolically, at least, Ariel is ying to her freedom. 21. Roger Warren wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Prosperos renunciation of his magic art involves a destruction of the theatrical means which have embodied it. 22. In an interview with Aviv Orani in Purchase, New York, in 1984, during the pre-Olympic performances of The Tempest, Carrero alluded to the signicance of the farewell to the stage implications of The Tempest to Shakespeare, to Prospero, to Strehler, and to himself. Strehler had left the theater briey, in 1979, shortly after the rst season of performances of The Tempest, in order to represent Italy in the European parliament. According to Orani, the actor stated that in the robes of Prospero upon breaking the magic wand he also bids his personal farewell to the theatre and intends to retire (319). This retirement was not long-standing. After 1984, Carraro performed in thirteen different Piccolo Teatro productions, including a small role in the revival of The Mountain Giants in Milan in 1994. He died in 1995. 23. Jan Kott documents a few alterations in the nal moments of The Tempest from its opening in 1978 to its remounting in 1984. In a 1979 article for Theatre, Kott talks of Ariel walking among the audience after being freed by Prospero, and of Ariel returning to sit at his [Prosperos] feet during the epilogue. By 1984, Ariel is exiting through the audience and out the back of the theater. She does not return to the stage until the company bow. More importantly, in 1978, the stage crumbles and collapses behind Carraro when he breaks Prosperos staff. In 1984, the stage is magically rebuilt behind Prospero as the epilogue is concluded. According to Kott:
In the last version, at the ending, the whole structure collapsed into a spectacular nothingness and from this nothingness once again emerged the stage. In Strehlers world and ethos, the stage could perish only for a short instant. (Prospero, or the Director, 141)
24. An excerpt from Kotts essay Prosperos Staff from Shakespeare Our Contemporary, was included in the Piccolo Teatros program for the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival.
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25. Kotts critical essay, when originally translated and printed in Theatre, was entitled Prospero or the Director, suggesting, perhaps, that either Prospero or the director could be in control of the production. When the article was reprinted in The Bottom Translation, a comma was added, the title now becoming Prospero, or the Director. This translators alteration of the title makes Kotts meaning slightly more ambiguous, while implying that Prospero is the director.
CHAPTER 6. THE NO TEMPEST: YUKIO NINAGAWA, 1988
1. One of the rst pieces of documentary evidence of Shakespeares presence in Japanese literature is the illustration which accompanied an Extract from the new Japanese drama, Hamuretu san, Danumark no Kami in 1874. In this illustration, Hamuretu is portrayed as a thoughtful samarai (Miyoshi, Japan, 397). 2. Such topicality was not uncommon in Japanese theater history. Indeed, it was one of Chikamatsus contributions to the Japanese stage tradition; in several Chikamatsu plays, crimes were reenacted onstage only months after they had actually occurred. 3. Akira Kurosawas lm of Macbeth, Kumonosu-Djo, literally translates to The Castle of the Spiders Web. The English title was changed to Throne of Blood. 4. The Brook interview with Reeves was published in the fall of 1966, and pulverization of the text of The Tempest was to be the key element in Brooks own 1968 production of the play. Apparently a sea change came upon Brook some time in 1967. Perhaps it was at that time that Brook recognized what Kurosawa and the earliest interpreters of Shakespeare in Japan already knew: there was an enormous potential for dramatic excitement generated through adaptation of text. 5. One such example is the Scrolls from the History of the Heiji Era, painted in the thirteenth century, and which is housed at the National Museum, Tokyo. The Scrolls from the History of the Heiji Era illustrate types of clothing and armor, the ox-drawn, covered carts with large, spoked wheels, the architecture and the interiors of the sumptuous residences (Guiganino, National Museum Tokyo, 100). 6. In October of 1991, the Ninagawa Company performed on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, a modern Japanese one-act play, Yukio Mishimas Sotoba Komachi, in a thoroughly Western style, in contemporary Western dress, and with the musical accompaniment of Gabriel Faures Pavane. In the plays dream sequence, in which the haggard old beggar-woman became young and beautiful again and danced with the lover of her youth, all the women sharing the dance oor with her were played by men. In creating Medea, his production of Greek tragedy, Ninagawa blended traditional Japanese theater, costuming, and music with classical Western theatrical conventions. In mounting a modern Japanese theater piece, he adopted an essentially Western form. 7. Like the musical score, Medeas costumes also blurred the distance be-
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tween East and West. Her rst entrance was in a magnicent traditional Japanese kimono, constructed from fty antique silk sashes. For this nal scene of horror, revenge, and escape, Medea appeared in a more Western, tight-tting, red gown. 8. The act 5, scene 1 stage directions have Prospero tracing a magic circle on the stage with his staff. In this production, that gesture was to be Prospero and the Directors co-signature. 9.The Tempests stage directions call for the properties used in the banquet scene to be removed by a quaint device. In this rehearsal/production, this was a simple matter of stage management. 10. This was the productions most resonant metatheatrical moment. As Prospero delivered his but this rough magic I do here abjure speech, the multiple layers of the production coalesced. Onstage was an actor playing Prospero in a production of The Tempest. But that actor was also playing the role of the artistic manager/director of a No company in a rehearsal of The Tempest on the island of Sado, the island to which Zeami, the father of No drama, had been exiled in 1434. Rough magic is crucial to Shakespeares drama, and Prosperos soliloquy where he vows to abjure from such sorcery is a resounding element within the structure of the play. The words of this speech became, in Ninagawas production, also the Directors words to his company, reecting back to the exiled Zeami and his analogous relationship to Prospero and his own exile. Prosperos speech overlapped with the Directors situation, becoming also a speech in which the Director told his company that he would be stepping down as their leader. As the company slowly wandered onto the stage, their unspoken questions hung in the air. What would happen to our Art if the Master left us? Was Prospero leaving his island? Was Shakespeare announcing his retirement from the stage? Was the Director announcing his retirement? Was Zeami announcing his? All of these possibilities fused. The company momentarily looked lost. Then came that plaintive cry of uncertainty and sorrow. Perhaps too, this moment of metatheatricality was Ninagawas way of declaring how The Tempest prevented his own farewell to the stage. In his interview with Michael Billington, Ninagawa revealed that he was creatively blocked in the late 1980s. Whether I was doing classics or new plays, I felt I wasnt catching the mood of the present. My talent was diminishing. I was copying myself, repeating old methods. If The Tempest hadnt worked, I would simply have stopped directing (Noh Way, 2526). 11. I particularly recall the laughter and joy of recognition with which the Barbican audience greeted Mirandas Japanese delivery of O brave new world.
CHAPTER 7. PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1990

1. David Merrick, the amboyant Broadway producer, had also been a nancial contributor to Brooks 1968 Tempest experiment at the Roundhouse Theatre in London. 2. Poh Sim Plowright, in her article Shakespeare and Hana: Some Paral-
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lels Between Peter Brooks 1990 Production of La Tempe te and Matsukaze, wrote of the No concept of freshness, which is symbolized by the ower. In Plow rights equation, when budding newness is added to feelings of unexpectedness, something theatrically innovative is created. It was this same sense of vitality and surprise that Brook strove for with the work of this new company, the CIRT. 3. In a fascinating acknowledgement of the multinational quality of the production, one Italian reviewer, Claudio Cumani, took delight that although this was an adaptation of Shakespeare into modern French, the production nevertheless stressed the musicality inherent in Shakespeares text (Review of 199091 La Tempete). 4. Yoshi Oida is also quite familiar with the performance of Giorgio Strehler in rehearsal. He laughed with uncontrolled glee when I asked him about the seemingly polar opposition of rehearsal styles and philosophies of Brook and Strehler. 5. In The Open Door, Brook wrote extensively of how the eventual stage picture for The Tempest resulted from the difculty in reconciling the conict between an abstract theater of the mind and a realistic stage design. To Brook, this disparity was most obvious in The Tempest in the transition from act 1, scene 1 into scene 2, the movement from the tempest-tossed ship to Prosperos island.
The play has a unity of place, the island, except for the rst scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a storm. Is it necessary to violate this unity by making a complicated realistic stage picture for the rst moments of the play? The better this is done, the more it destroys the possibility of evoking the island subsequently in a non-naturalistic convention and the harder it makes the playing of the second long scene of quiet exposition, when Prospero tells his life to his daughter. If the convention chosen is one of elaborate pictorial scenery, the solution is easy: One makes an impressive shipwreck, then one slides into place a desert island. But if one rejects this approach, one must discover what can effortlessly convey at one moment sea and at the next, dry land. (12728)
How Brook and his set designer, Chloe Obolensky resolved this conundrum of stage setting is an interesting case study in the work process of the CICT. The original, tentative set design consisted of natural elementsspecically red earth that was molded into rises and hillocks. This created a glowingly impressive place of epic proportions . . . which made our actions seem pitifully inadequate (13637). The conict arose between the minimalistrepresented by bamboo sticks which suggested the ship when held horizontally, and the forest when held uprightand the realistic red earth island which did not evoke an island in the mind . . . it became a real island (137). The rst attempt at a solution was to increase the scale of all of the props. This proved to be unsatisfactory as the company was now adapting their acting to the set, and in a company dedicated to a celebration of the relationship of actor to performance space, this was unconscionable. Brook claimed that the solution to the set design problem came during the companys traditional visit, about two-thirds of the way through their rehearsal process, to an elementary school. There, they attempted to improvise directly
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a version of the play using the possibilities of the space in which we nd ourselves, taking hold only of the objects lying around the room, using them freely for whatever we need (138). This performance forced the company to become storytellersmaking the story come alive freshly, moment by moment (138). The key element in this successful rehearsal/exercise/performance was the use of a dirty gray rug within a very small space. The performance became a kind of scavenger hunt as actors scoured the areas adjoining the performance space for anything that might be appropriate to the story that they were trying to enact. Banging doors and shaken plastic curtains recreated the storm; piles of shoes were substituted for the logs that Ferdinand gathered for Prospero. A wire net that surrounded the plants in the schools garden was co-opted by Ariel and used to imprison the nobles. To Brook, this performance had no aesthetic style. It was rough, immediate and totally successful (139). The performance proved to Brook the paramount importance of visual simplicity represented on this day by the gray carpet, and that this production need[ed] to be freed from any decorative statement that connes the imagination (140). The performance at the elementary school led to a series of experiments at the Bouffes du Nord with carpets placed in the middle of the red earth/stage. The rst candidate was a large, colorful Persian carpet, a holdover from The Conference of the Birds. This proved to be too distracting. The school carpet was successful because it was virtually invisible. It was plain, familiar, worn-out, and could not be read by the audience as anything other than what it was. Finally, Obolensky came upon the solution by framing a carpet with bamboo poles, then taking up the carpet, leaving a rectangular imprint, and lling that outline with sand. Then, in order to give the island space a strong point of reference, Obolensky placed a large rock within it. Colorful Persian carpets were nally adapted for the use of the onstage musicians exclusively, while the stage space became, according to Brook, a playing eld . . . a place in which theatre does not pretend to be anything other than theatre (142). 6. These critical readings of the playing space as metaphorical playground are testimony to the crucial role of the companys elementary school visit upon the nal shape of this production. In The Open Door, Brook recounted how he knew this production was on the right track when his company was able to improvise the story of The Tempest while holding spellbound an audience of one hundred schoolchildren. In Brooks words:
Children are far better and more precise than most friends and drama critics, they have no prejudices, no theories, no xed ideas. They come wanting to be fully involved in what they experience, but if they are not interested, they have no reason to hide their lack of attention . . . (The Open Door, 139)
Approval of children for The Tempest was vital to Brook in view of how he perceived the play. In his program notes for the production, Brook described The Tempest as an exploration of lifes illusions through a set of charades and games both for the actor and for the audience. 7. For the Zurich premiere of Brooks Tempest, the image of the play as sumptuous international feast was even further underlined. The opening night began with a long preshow, and both a metatheatrical parallel to the opening of Ninagawas No Tempest and a Brechtian wink at the audience, reminding them
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that the action that was to follow was to be theatrical spectacle. As in Ninagawas production, the entire company, Brook included, preset itself upon the stage. Here was a company of actors with their director preparing to perform some demonstration, or rehearsal, of their skill. The house was opened to reveal an acting space, but which now served as dining hall. Long tables were set up upon the stage. Brook and the CICT company could be seen upon that stage, eating their preshow meal. This preperformance eating ritual was abandoned by the time The Tempest opened at the Bouffes du Nord. There, the production (and the remainder of the performances of the play) began with the entrance of the two musicians. 8. Brook called this log a musicians vital discovery . . . a hollow tube full of pebbles which made a swishing sound like the waves of the sea . . . evoke[d] the storm and suggest[ed an] island of imagination [on which] . . . the performance will take place (The Open Door, 13334). 9. The characters of Adrian and Francisco were cut from the production, leaving just the principal noblemen: Alonzo, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Antonio, and Ferdinand. 10. Brook wrote that he sought a Miranda who possessed the grace that a traditional upbringing could give. We found an Indian girl, trained as a dancer by her mother from an early age, and another very young girl, half-Vietnamese (The Open Door, 129). Throughout the run of The Tempest over the course of the next eighteen months, these two young women, Shantala Malhar-Shivalingappa and Romane Bohringer alternated in the role. 11. Instead of dwelling upon racial or class distinctions, Brook wrote that he saw Calibans anger as the ferocious, dangerous, uncontrollable rebellion of an adolescent of today (The Open Door, 128). Going into further detail in this analysis of the character of Caliban, Brook told Gerard Raymond: Like todays teenager, he has tremendous energy but no self-control or self-discipline . . . Caliban is totally blinded by his anger and his uncontrollable nature. When he realizes what an idiot he has been at the end of the play, he has intimations of something else, it is quite clear that something is growing in him (Peter Brook as Prospero, 17). Apparently, that growth was lost upon some of the reviewers. Masolino dAmico saw this interpretation of the character of Caliban as hysterical and unsound. 12. Maria Grazia Gregori saw comic elements of Waiting for Godot in Bruce Myerss interpretation of Trinculo. Irving Wardle likened Alain Maratrats evolution of Stephano from tottering shipboard steward into Calibans revenge king to the transformation of an uppity ships butler into a Tambourlainelike potentate, [who is] still obstinately hugging his scarlet robe after his dream of glory has evaporated. 13. Hunt and Reeves saw this moment as particularly revealing, with yet another reference to the importance of the circle in this Brook production. In their account, they wrote: at this moment, the magical circle which Brook seeks to create between actors and audience is joined in celebratory mirth (Peter Brook, 271).
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Index
Abe, Kobo, 125 Accademia dei Filodrammatici, 25 Adenauer, Konrad, 186 n. 18 Adrian, 57, 59, 104, 106, 138, 198 n. 9 Alonzo, 39, 40, 5657, 59, 101, 106, 108, 134, 138, 140, 156, 158, 161, 191 n. 14, 198 n. 9 Anderson Foundation, 143 Anouilh, Jean, 47, 184 n. 4; Ring Around the Moon, 47, 184 n. 4 Antoine, Andre, 32 Antonelli, Luigi, 27, Antonio, 17, 38, 56, 57, 59, 77, 104, 106, 108, 11112, 135, 156, 158, 161, 191 n. 13, 19192 n. 16, 198 n. 9 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 28 aragato, 127 Arden, John, 67; Sergeant Musgraves Dance, 67 Ariel, 15, 17, 34, 3742, 5658, 6061, 76, 78, 8285, 102, 10611, 13339, 141, 14849, 15051, 15758, 159 63, 165, 185 n. 10, 185 n. 11, 186 n. 18, 189 n. 2, 190 nn. 11 and 12, 191 n. 13, 19192 n. 16, 192 n. 19, 193 nn. 20 and 23, 19697 n. 5 Ariosto, Ludovico, 23 Aris, Doreen, 56 Arlecchino, 160 Armin, Robert, 99 Artaud, Antonin, 19, 4849, 51, 53, 6768, 7476, 150; The Spurt of Blood, 67; The Theatre and its Double, 53 Arts Lab, 73 Arts Theatre, 53 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 128 Bacon, Francis, 60, 186 n. 17; Magnalia Natur, 186 n. 17 Banu, Georges, 146, 15354 Barber, Samuel, 128 Barrault Jean-Louis, 4647, 69, 71, 187 n. 4 Battistini, Fabio, 94, 96 Battistoni, Carlo, 190 n. 10 Baumann, Sally, 5051, 184 n. 3 Beckett, Samuel, 5253, 6465, 146, 198 n. 12; Endgame, 65; Malone Dies, 66; Molloy, 66; Waiting for Godot, 5254, 58, 6566, 198 n. 12 Bedford, Brian, 57, 185 n. 10, 186 nn. 18 and 19 Bergman, Ingmar, 183 n. 1 Berliner Ensemble, 19, 53, 95, 186 n. 18, 187 n. 4 Berney, William, 46 Berry, Ralph, 12, 89, 99, 192 n. 19 Billington, Michael, 12, 131, 14647, 151, 195 n. 10 Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 45 Blake, William, 154, 185 n. 11 Blin, Roger, 67, 187 n. 2 Blackfriars, The, 13 Blumenthal, J., 121 Boboli Gardens, 18, 3234, 8889, 165, 183 n. 3 Bohringer, Romane, 198 n. 10 Booker, Christopher, 52 Bosch, Hieronymous, 48 Bradby, David, 131 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 28 Brandon, James R., 114, 127 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 23, 2728, 31, 49, 51, 53, 64, 6667, 68, 73, 89, 93, 95 99, 101, 128, 186 n. 18, 189 n. 4, 197 98 n. 7; Galileo, 97; The Good Person of Setzuan, 96; Mother Courage, 54; St. Joan of the Stockyards, 98; The Threepenny Opera, 28, 96
219
220
INDEX
Brighella, 38 Brignone, Lilla, 37 British Arts Council, 71 Brockett, Oscar, 70, 187 n. 5 Broilo, Renata, 40 Bronzoni, Magda, 40 Brook, Peter, 11, 16, 18, 20, 21: (early biography), 4454, 5863; (career 19571968), 6476, 7880, 8384, 8687, 99, 111, 121, 130; (relocation to Paris and establishment of CICT), 14345; (Timon of Athens production), 14547; (1990 Tem pest/La Tempete), 14763; (about the three productions), 16466, 16869, 182 n. 1, 184 nn. 2, 3, 4 and 8, 185 nn. 9, 10, 12, and 13, 186 n. 18, 187 nn. 2, 3, 4, and 5, 188 n. 7, 188 nn. 9, 10, and 11, 189 n. 13, 194 n. 4, 195 n. 1, 19596 n. 2, 196 n. 4, 19697 n. 5, 197 n. 6, 19798 n. 7, 198 nn. 8, 10, 11, and 13; The Conference of the Birds, 145, 19697 n. 5; The Empty Space, 48, 55; The Mahabharata, 20, 149, 153, 161; Marat/ Sade (Weiss), 67, 151; The Open Door, 55, 151, 19697 n. 5, 197 n. 6, 198 nn. 8, 10, and 11; Orghast, 145; The Shifting Point, 73, 144, 14950, 161; Tell Me Lies, 68; Ubu aux Bouffes, 147, Brown, Georgina, 143 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 48 Bryden, Ronald, 86 Bungei Kyokai (the Literary and Dramatic Association), 118, 119120 Bungei Za (the Literary Theatre), 120 Bunraku theatre, 115 Byrne, Muriel St. Clare, 185 n. 11 Cairns, Christopher, 28 Calderon, Pedro de la Barca, 29, 74, 182 n. 4; Life is a Dream, 182 n. 4; The Prodigious Sorcerer, 29 Caliban, 13, 1718, 34, 3742, 5759, 61, 68, 76, 80, 8286, 1029, 11112, 116, 13435, 13740, 148, 15758, 160, 165; (stage interpretations of ),
16668, 183 n. 4, 187 n. 3, 188 nn. 6, and 8, 189 n. 12, 19192 n. 16, 192 n. 19, 198 n. 11 Camilleri, Andrea, 24 Camus, Albert, 26; Caligula, 26 Caprioli. Vittorio, 38 Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 101 Carlson, Marvin, 4849, 153 Carmen (Bizet), 152 Carraro, Tino, 110, 189 n. 3, 193 nn. 22 and 23 ` Carriere, Jean-Claude, 14749, 152 Carroll, Lewis, 15 Castello, Giulio Cesare, 183 n. 7 Centre International de Creations ` Theatrales (CICT), 70, 78, 87, 144, 147, 149, 15051, 168, 19697 n. 5, 19798 n. 7 Centre International de Recherche ` Theatrale (CIRT), 14344, 150, 19596 n. 2 Ceres, 107, 137, 140 Cesaire, Aime, 17 Chaikin, Joseph, 76 Chanticleer Theatre Club, 45 Chekhov, Anton, 130, 147, 151; The Cherry Orchard, (La Cerisaie), 147; The Sea Gull, 151; Three Sisters, 13031 Chiarelli, Luigi, 27 Chikamatsu, Munzaemon, 115, 194 n. 2 The Chikyu Za (the Globe Company), 120 Cinthio, Giovambattista Giraldi, 23 Citizen Kane, 186 n. 18 Clifford, John, 12728 Clunes, Alec, 57, 61 Cocteau, Jean, 45; Infernal Machine, 45 Colchiaghi, Ebe, 183 n. 7 Collison-Morley, Lacy, 31; Shakespeare in Italy, 31 ` Comedie Francaise, 62 commedia dellarte, 2122, 3839, 45, 7071, 73, 9091, 105, 110, 15960, 16768, 187 n. 6, 19192 n. 16; Li Tre Satiri, 187 n. 6; Pantoloncino,
INDEX
221
188 n. 6; Pazzia, 188 n. 6; The Strangers, 188 n. 6 Contini, Ermano, 32 Cook, Judith, 60 Copeau, Jacques, 16, 3234 Cornish, Roger, 73 Covent Garden, 47, 67 Coward, Noel, 48 Craig, Edward Gordon, 55, 117 Croyden, Margaret, 66, 72, 7583, 85, 151, 168 Cumani, Claudio, 154, 162, 196 n. 3 Dadaism, 71, 74 Dali, Salvador, 47, 89 Damiani, Luciano, 95 dAmico, Masolino, 149, 198 n. 11 DAmico, Silvio, 32 Danjuro, Ichigawa, 127 Dapporto, Elena, 148 Dark of the Moon (Richardson & Berney), 47 Darlington, W. A., 186 n. 16 Davenant, William, 1314 deadly theatre, 48, 53 Deburau, Jean-Baptiste, 45 De Gaulle, Charles, 71, 186 n. 18 De Jongh, Nicholas, 118, 128, 129 Delacorte Theatre, 128, 169 ` Della Fatalita considerata come elemento drammatico, 30 Della Storia e della Ragione dogni Poesia, 29 De Lullo, Giorgio, 183 n. 7 De Witt, Johannes, 90 Dignam, Mark, 56 Directors Theatre (Bradby & Williams), 131 Disasters of War (Goya), 52 Donmar Rehearsal Rooms, 67 Dorinda, 13 Dowden, Edward, 117, 18; Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 117 Drury Lane Theatre, 14, 56, 184 n. 6, 185 n. 14, 18586 n. 15, 186 n. 16 Dryden, John, 1314 Duchartre, Pierre Louis, 45
Duse, Eleanora, 31 Dymkowski, Christine, 11, 182 n. 5 Edinburgh Festival, 49, 127 El Greco (Domenico Theotokopoulos), 184 n. 8 Eliot, T. S., 26, 98; Murder in the Cathedral, 26; The Waste Land, 98 Elizabethan Stage Society, 15 Elsom, John, 54 empty space, 48, 99 Entertainments National Service Association, 45 Epstein, Jacob, 50, 128 Esslin, Martin, 66; The Theatre of the Absurd, 66 Euripedes, 128; Medea, 12830, 194 n. 6, 19495 n. 7 European Gulbenkian Foundation, 143 Evans, Malcolm, 17 Faure, Gabriel, 128; Pavane, 194 n. 6 Faust (Goethe), 62, 190 n. 9 Farren, Elizabeth, 14 Ferdinand, 17, 34, 3641, 5759, 76, 85, 103, 105, 1078, 111, 134, 135 38, 140, 156, 15862, 183 n. 7, 185 n. 10, 189 n. 12, 19697 n. 5, 198 n. 9 Ferrara, Albertina, 25 Fickle, Frivolous, and Sincere, 129 Findlay, Robert, 70, 187 n. 5 Foakes, R. A., 182 n. 5 Ford Foundation, 143 Fouquet, Jean, 192 n. 17; Le Martyre de Sainte Apolline, 192 n. 17 Francisco, 104, 106, 138, 198 n. 9 Freehold, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 83 Frigerio, Ezio, 99 Frink, Elisabeth, 128 Fry, Christopher, 47, 184 n. 4; The Dark is Light Enough, 47 Fudo Myoo, 123, 127 Furnivall, F. J., 117 Fuseli, Henry, 185 n. 11 futurism, 2627, 7071 Gaipa, Ettore, 18, 35, 40, 42, 183 n. 2 Garcia, Vittorio, 74, 76, 78
222
INDEX
Garrick, David, 1314 Gekko, Takayasu, 117 Genet, Jean, 53, 67, 187 n. 2; The Balcony (Le Balcon), 53, 67, 187 n. 2; The Screens, 67 Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne), 34 Gibbs, Mary Logan, 14 Gielgud, John, 1819, 4849, 5961, 68, 18485 n. 8, 185 nn. 10 and 12 Giotto, Abano, 46 The Globe Theatre, 13, 90 The Gobelins, 70, 72 Goldoni, Carlo, 23, 25, 29, 8990, 189 n. 2; The Servant of Two Masters, 29, 189 n. 2 Gonzalo, 16, 39, 5657, 59, 7778, 101, 104, 106, 138, 140, 15558, 16061, 164, 198 n. 9 Gordon, Giles, 128 Gorki, Maxim, 29, 119; The Lower Depths, 29, 119 Goya, Francisco, 52 Goy-Blanquet, Dominique, 157 Granville-Barker, Harley, 16 Grassi, Paolo, 2328, 90, 9798 Gray, H. D., 187 n. 6 Gregori, Maria Grazia, 198 n. 12 Grice, Maureen, 1415 Gross, John, 184 n. 2; Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, 184 n. 2 Grotowski, Jerzy, 19, 49, 70, 74, 97 Gruppo Palcoscenico, 2627 Gruppo Teatre e Azione, 98 Guarini, Giambattista, 23 Gussow, Mel, 128 Hall, Peter, 67, 95 Hamuretu san, Danumark no Kami, 194 n. 1 Harris, Robert, 56 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 119; Lonely Lives, 119 Hayman, Ronald, 48, 52, 189 n. 13 Hearn, Lafcadio, 114 Hearty but Flippant, 129 Hippolito, 13 Hirst, David, 3435, 60, 91, 9596, 9899, 11112, 184 n. 8, 185 n. 12,
189 nn. 5 and 7, 191 n. 13, 19192 n. 16 Hobson, Harold, 51, 53, 7980, 85, 188 n. 7 Hochhuth, Rolf, 67; The Representative, 67 Hogarth, William, 45 holy theatre, 4849, 151 Hornby, Richard, 127 Houghton, William A., 114 House, Edward H., 114 Hughes, Ted, 68, 145 Hunt, Albert, 6970, 7475, 159, 198 n. 13 Hyman, Earle, 166 Ibsen, Henrik, 119, 131; John Gabriel Borkman, 119; Peer Gynt, 131 Il Capriccio, 188 n. 6 Il teatro dell Favole rappresentative, 22 Independent Theatre Movement, 28 Ingram, William, 17 Innes, Christopher, 80, 188 n. 8 Interaction, 73 Iris, 107, 13637, 140 Isotta, Paolo, 98 Jackson, Barry, 45, 120 Japan Womens University, 120 Jarry, Alfred, 28, 125, 147; Ubu Roi, 125 Jiyu Gekijo (Free Theatre), 11920 Joan of Arc, 190 n. 7 John, Elton, 130 Johnson, Richard, 57 The Joint Stock Theatre Company, 73 Jonasson, Andrea, 94 Jones, David Richard, 184 n. 3 Jones, Inigo, 55 Jones, James Earl, 166 Jonson, Ben, 115 Jordan, Dorothy, 14 Jouvet, Louis: Elvira, O la passione teatrale, 190 n. 9 Jungi, Kinoshita, 116 Juno, 107, 137, 140, 186 n. 16 Kabuki theatre, 78, 11314, 116, 119, 121, 12528
INDEX
223
Kaoru, Osanai, 119 Kean, Charles, 13, 15 Kedrova, Lila, 67 Kemble, John Philip, 14 Kennedy, Dennis, 45, 5051 Kennedy, Robert, 68 Keown, Eric, 61, 184 n. 7 Ketels, Violet, 73 Kiernander, Adrian, 92 Kindai-geki Kyokai (the Modern Dramatic Society), 120 King, Martin Luther Jr., 68 Kings Men, The, 13 Kingston, Jeremy, 151 kizewamano, 114 Kleber, Pia, 190 n. 10, 192 n. 19 Komisjarevsky, Theodore, 4546, 184 n. 2 Kott, Jan, 5152, 6566, 75, 83, 100 101, 11012, 187 n. 3, 190 n. 11, 19192 n. 16, 19293 n. 19, 193 nn. 23 and 24, 194 n. 25; The Bottom Translation, 194 n. 25; Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 110, 193 n. 23, Kouyate, Sotigui, 14849 Kozon, Fukuda, 116 Kurasawa, Akira, 118, 12125, 141, 194 n. 3; Throne of Blood, 12125, 194 n. 3 Kyogen theatre, 12627, (KyogenKata), 140, 167 Lamb, Charles and Mary, 11517,140; Tales from Shakespeare, 11518, 140 Lambert, J. W., 6162, 185 n. 13 Lamont, Rosette, 100, 190 n. 11 La Scala, 9798 Lazzarini, Giulia, 189 n. 3, 190 n. 9, 19091 n. 12, 193 n. 20 Lea, K. M., 187 n. 6 Lee, Canada, 166 Leigh, Vivien, 50 Licensing Act of 1737, The, 73 Living Theatre, The, 97 Lloyd, Robin, 56 Lombardo, Agostino, 2930, 182 n. 3, 183 n. 6
London Arts Theatre, 67 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, 193 n. 23 Louis XIV, 70 Lovric, Alberta, 25 Lovric, Olympio, 25 Luckham, Cyril, 56 Lyttleton Theatre, 127 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 25 Macready, Charles, 14 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 28, 119, 184 n. 1; Bluebird, 184 n. 1 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 34, 40, 42, 98 Malhar-Shivalingappa, Shantala, 198 n. 10 Malraux, Andre, 71 Mannvell, Roger, 123, 125 Manzini, Giuseppi, 30 Maratrat, Alain, 159, 168, 198 n. 12 Marinetti, Fillippo Tomasso, 27 Marlowe, Christopher, 44; Doctor Faustus, 44; Tambourlaine, 198 n. 12 Marowitz, Charles, 6568, 186 n. 18, 187 n. 1 Marx Brothers, The, 160; Duck Soup, 160 Marx, Karl, 67 Masayasu, Tozawa, 114 Meiji Revolution of, 1868, 114 Memorial Theatre, 56 Menander, 91 Mendelsohn, Felix, 85, 120 Merrick, David, 71, 195 n. 1; (The David Merrick Arts Foundation), 144 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 12, 3132, 73, 169, 182 n. 3 mie, 127 Mifune, Toshiro, 123 Miller, Arthur, 53, 67; A View from the Bridge (Vue du pont), 53, 67, 185 n. 10 Miller, Jonathan, 12 Miranda, 13, 20, 3640, 5659, 61, 7677, 8182, 85, 1023, 1059,
224
INDEX
11112, 13338, 140, 15660, 162, 183 n. 7, 185 n. 14, 188 n. 8, 190 nn. 8 and 11, 195 n. 11, 198 n. 10 Mishima, Yukio, 194 n. 6; Sotaba Komachi, 194 n. 6 Miyashita, Nobuo, 130, 141 Miyoshi, Maso, 11516, 194 n. 1 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 9192, 184 n. 5 Modena, Gustav, 30 Moretti, Marcello, 37 Moro, Aldo, 100 Moscow Art Theatre, 32 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 184 n. 1; The Magic Flute, 184 n. 1 The Mumei Kai (the Club without a Name), 119 musha-e, 124 ` musique concrete, 50, 61 Mussolini, Bennito, 24, 26, 97 Mutsohito, Japanese Emperor, 114 Muza, Anna, 169 Myers, Bruce, 15960, 198 n. 12 Nagler, A. M., 192 n. 17 Nakane, Tadeo, 129 Nassar, Abdul, 52 Neri, F., 187 n. 6 New Statesman, The, 60 New Symphonic Society, 120 Next Wave Festival (Brooklyn), 127 Nicoll, Allardyce, 187 n. 6 Ninagawa, Yukio, 11, 13, 20, 21, 113, 118, 121; (background and productions through 1988) 125131; (1988 Tempest), 131142, 167, 169, 182 nn. 1 and 5, 194 n. 6, 195 n. 10, 19798 n. 7 Nissei Theatre, 130 No theatre, 81, 115, 12128, 131, (Mugen-Nofantasy No), 13941, 160, 167, 195 n. 10, 19596 n. 2, 19798 n. 7 Nouryeh, Andrea J. 113, 120, 126127 Novelli, Ermete, 31 Obelensky, Chloe, 15354, 19697 n. 5 Odashima, Yushi, 116 Odeon Theatre de France, 71, 187 n. 4 Oedipus (Seneca), 68
Oida, Yoshi, 69, 71, 7681, 87, 151, 15556, 188 n. 10, 196 n. 4 Olivier, Laurence, 50 ONeill, Eugene, 28; Mourning Becomes Electra, 28 Open Space, The, 73 Open Theatre, The, 69, 144 Orani, Aviv, 34, 42, 90, 99, 182 n. 1, 193 n. 22 Orgel, Stephen, 13, 15, 182 n. 2, 184 n. 8, 185 n. 9, 186 n. 17, 190 n. 12 Osborne, John, 19, 5354, 64; Look Back in Anger, 5354 Otojiro, Kawasaki, 117 Owens, Craig, 17, 68 Oxford University, 44 Ozawa, Seiji, 130 Parigi, Giulio, 34 Peking Opera, 78 People Show, The, 73 Pepys, Samuel, 14 Petriccione, Federico, 34 Phoenix Theatre, 49 Piccolo, Ottavia, 99 Piccolo Scala, 96 Piccolo Teatro, 2324, 2829, 41, 88, 9091, 9698, 183 nn. 1, 2, and 7, 187 n. 4, 189 n. 1, 193 nn. 22 and 23 Pierrot, 45, 102 Pinter, Harold, 54, 64; The Birthday Party, 54, Pip Simmons Group, The, 73 Pirandello, Luigi, 19, 25, 27, 89, 91, 96, 112, 19192 n. 16; The Mountain Giants, 9194, 96, 193 n. 22 Plowright, Poh Sim, 14748, 15356, 160, 19596 n. 2 Poel, William, 15 Pollack, Daniel B. 48 The Portable Theatre, 73 Posizione, 27 Pratella, Brahilla, 27 Princess Elizabeth (daughter of Charles I), 13 Prospero, 1218, 22, 3436, 3842, 46, 5662, 68, 77, 80, 8286, 100112, 13141, 14849, 15463, 16567,
INDEX
225
169, 182 n. 3, 183 n. 6, 184 nn. 6, 7, and 8, 185 nn. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, 186 n. 16, 188 n. 8, 189 n. 2, 190 nn. 8 and 11, 19091 n. 12, 191 n. 13, 19192 n. 16, 192 nn. 17, 18, and 19, 193 nn. 21, 22, and 23, 194 n. 25, 195 nn. 8 and 10, 196 97 n. 5 Pulcinella, 38 Purcell, Henry, 14 Quadrio, Francesco Saverio, 29 Quasimoto, Salvatore, 3638, 183 nn. 3, 5, and 7 Quayle, Anthony, 50 Rabkin, Gerald, 20 Ratto, Gianni, 3536, 183 n. 1 Raymond, Gerard, 14849, 198 n. 11 Reeves, Geoffrey, 6970, 7476, 78, 121, 159, 194 n. 4, 198 n. 13 Reinhardt, Max, 13, 16, 19, 3234, 110 Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, 17 Revill, Clive, 58 Richards, Kenneth and Laura, 22, 38 Richardson, Howard, 46 Richie, Donald, 12425 Risorgimento, 29 Ristori, Adelaide, 31 Rodin, Francois, 128 Rodowicz, Jadwiga, 121, 140 Romanticism, 29 Ronconi, Luca, 187 n. 5; Orlando Furioso, 187 n. 5 Rossi, Ernesto, 31 Rossi, Luisa, 183 n. 7 Rota, Nino, 96; A Florentine Straw Hat, 96 rough theatre, 4849, 151 Roundhouse Theatre, 19, 72, 84, 151, 16667, 195 n. 1 Royal Court at Whitehall, 13 Royal Shakespeare Company, 67, 69, 71, 86, 184 n. 3, 187 n. 3 Rubens, Peter Paul, 52 Sachs, Harvey, 26, 93, 97, 169 Sadanji, 119 Saint-Denis, Michel, 67
Salacrou, Armand, 29; Nights of Wrath, 29 Salander, Anna, 184 n. 1 Salgado, Gamini, 15 Salvini, Tommasso, 31 Sangere, Bakary, 14849, 160 San Secondo, Piermaria Rosso di, 27 Sato, Tadeo, 12324 Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of, 32 Scala, Flamineo, 22 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 18, 40, 90 Scarlatti, Domenico, 18, 40, 90 Schnitzler, Arthur, 28 Scoeld, Paul, 4546, 65, 66 Scrolls from the History of Heiji Era, 194 n. 5 Sebastian, 13, 17, 36, 38, 5657, 59, 104, 106, 108, 11112, 135, 156, 158, 161, 191 nn. 13 and 14, 19192 n. 16, 198 n. 9 Serlio, Sebatiano, 110 Shadwell, Thomas, 14 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 45, 46, 184 n. 6 Shakespeare, William, 11, 1317, 1923; (performance history in Italy), 2934, 4244, 55, 61, 64, 67, 75, 8081, 8587, 89, 91, 9596, 98 100, 11012; (performance history in Japan), 11325, 13031, 139, 14143, 14548, 151, 154, 164, 166, 169, 182 nn. 1 and 2, 185 n. 10, 186 n. 18, 189 nn. 1 and 2, 19192 n. 16, 192 n. 19, 193 n. 22, 194 nn. 1 and 4, 195 n. 10, 19596 n. 2, 196 n. 3; Antony and Cleopatra, 182 n. 1; As You Like It, 33, (Rosalinda), 89; Comedy of Errors, 46; Coriolanus, 31, 95, 14445, 182 n. 1; Hamlet, 29, 44, 58, 114, 11820, 130, 162, 182 n. 1; Henry IV, Part, 1, 90, 95, 118, 182 n. 1, 184 n. 5, 19192 n. 16; Henry IV, Part II, 118, 182 n. 1; Henry VI plays (Il gioco dei potenti), 96, 98, 182 n. 1, 189 nn. 6 and 7; Julius Caesar, 31, 114, 117, 182 n. 1; King John, 45, 182 n. 1; King Lear, 31, 6566, 72, 81, 98100; (Dark-
226
INDEX
ness and Light), 117, 130, 151, 182 nn. 1 and 5, 185 n. 9, 186 n. 18, 187 nn. 1 and 3; Loves Labours Lost, 4546, 182 n. 1; Macbeth, 30, 9495, 98, 114, 118, 12021; (Ninagawa), 12527, 13031, 182 n. 1, 191192 n. 16, 194 n. 3; Measure for Measure, 48, 52; (Mesure pour Mesure), 147, 182 n. 1; The Merchant of Venice, 32, 46, 110; (Sakura-doki Kane-No Yononaka), 116, 119; A Midsummer Nights Dream, 32, 34, 8687, 120, 130, 143, 15152, 164, 182 n. 1, 189 n. 13; Much Ado About Nothing, 120; Othello, 3032, 98, 114, 117; Richard II, 29, 41, 182 n. 1, 189 n. 1; Richard III, 182 n. 1; Romeo and Juliet, 29, 4647, 118; (Ninagawa), 130, 182 n. 1; The Taming of the Shrew, 90, 182 n. 1; The Tempest, 1112; (early performance history) 1316; (and postmodern theory) 1718, 22, 29; (Strehler 1948 production), 3443, 46, 51; (Brooks 1957 production) 5564, 67; (Brooks 1968 production), 68 90, 95, 98; (Strehlers 1978 production), 100112, 116, 120, 130; (Ninagawas 1988 production), 13142; (Brooks 1990 Tempest/La Tempete), 14764, 169, 182 nn. 1 and 2, 183 nn. 1 and 2, 184 n. 6, 185 nn. 10 and 12, 186 n. 17, 187 nn. 3 and 4, 188 nn. 7, 9, and 11, 189 nn. 13, 2, 3, 190 nn. 8, 9, 10, and 12, 192 n. 19, 193 nn. 22 and 23, 194 n. 4, 195 nn. 9, 10, and 1, 19596 n. 2, 196 n. 3, 19697 n. 5, 197 n. 6, 197 98 n. 7, 198 n. 10; Timon of Athens ` (Timon dAthenes), 14547, 182 n. 1; Titus Andronicus, 5053, 61, 64 65, 182 n. 1; Troilus and Cressida, 89; Twelfth Night, 120, 182 n. 1; The Winters Tale, 49, 182 n. 1, 184 n. 1 Sharoff, Pietro, 3132, 34 Shaw, George Bernard, 48; Pygmalion, 45 shingeki (modern) theatre, 119, 129
the shinpa movement, 11617 Shiraz Festival (Iran), 143 Shoyo, Tsubouchi, 114, 118, 120 Simoni, Renato, 33 Small Basement Theatre (Tokyo), 125 Solomon, Alissa, 191 n. 15 Sophocles, 130; Oedipus Rex, 130 Speaight, Robert, 187 n. 3 Spoleto Festival, 187 n. 5 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 26, 3132, 188 n. 10; My Life in Art, 31 Stanton, Barry, 83 Stephano, 19, 35, 3840, 5859, 84, 1058, 11112, 116, 135, 13738, 140, 15960, 16667, 183 n. 5, 191 92 n. 16, 198 n. 12 Stewart, Patrick, 169 Strauss, Richard, 47; Olympians, The, 47 Strehler, Bruno, 25 Strehler, Giorgio, 11, 1819, 2123; (early biography), 2531, 3334, 36, 38, 4143; (Shakespeare work 19491951) 8890; (in rehearsal) 9194; (production work 1956 1972), 9598; (King Lear), 98100, (1978 Tempest), 100112, 130, 152 53, 159, (about the 48 and 78 productions), 16569, 182 nn. 1, 3, and 5, 183 nn. 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7, 187 n. 4, 189 nn. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7, 190 nn 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, 191 nn. 13 and 14, 19192 n. 16, 192 nn. 17 and 19, 193 nn. 20 and 22, 196 n. 4; Per un teatro umano, 95, 189 n. 5 Strindberg, August, 28, 119 Styan, J. L., 66 Summers, James, 114 Swan Theatre, 90 Sycorax, 13, 8283, 102, 158 Tairov, Alexander, 26, 31 Tabrizi-Zadeh, Mahmoud, 154 Takahashi, Yasunari, 114, 119 Talli, Virgileo, 27 Tasso, Torquato, 23 Taylor, Gary, 15, 65 Theatre Antoine, 67
INDEX
227
Theatre Bouffes du Nord, 69, 143, 153, 19697 n. 5, 19798 n. 7 Theatre de lAthenee, 67 Theatre du Soleil, 92 Theatre Gymnase, 67 Theatre of Contemporary People, 125, 129 theatre of cruelty 67 Theatre of the Independence, 28 Theatre of Nations Festival, 19, 68 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 52 Toho Company, 12930 Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Club, 120 Torch Theatre, 44 Torgovnik, Marianna, 149 Torrieri, Diana, 28 Toru, Hoshi, 117 Toyoda, Minoru, 11617, 121 Traverse Theatre Workshop, 73 Tree, Henry Beerbohm, 182 n. 2 Trewin, J. C., 46, 58, 184 nn. 6 and 8, 185 nn. 13 and 14, 18586 n. 15, 186 n. 16 Trilling, Ossia, 49 Trinculo, 19, 35, 38, 3940, 5859, 84, 1058, 11112, 116, 135, 13738, 140, 15960, 16667, 188 n. 6, 191 192 n. 16, 198 n. 12 Trousdell, Richard, 9293, 16869, 189 n. 4 Trussler, Simon, 6567 Tsuchitori, Toshi, 154 Tsukiji Sho Gekijo (the Tsukiji Little Theatre), 120 Tsunaeri, Fukuda, 116 Tulane Drama Review, 23 Tynan, Kenneth, 44, 45, 52, 5859, 62 University of Arts (Tokyo), 125 UNESCO, 143 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 32 Vallone, Raf, 67 van Buchell, Arend, 90 Vaughan, Aldan T. and Virginia Mason, 21, 8384, 166, 187 n. 3; Shakespeares Caliban, 187 n. 3 Verdi, Giuseppe, 30, 98; Falstaff, 30, 98; Simon Boccanegra, 98
Veronese (Paolo Callieri), 52 Vieux-Colombier, 33 Viespro, Franco, 183Ch. 2, n. 1 Visconti, Luchino, 89 Volksbuhne Theatre, 16 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 29, Wagner, Richard, 130; The Flying Dutchman, 130 Wardle, Irving, 198 n. 12 Warren, Roger, 193 n. 21 Wasaburo, Asano, 114 Watergate Theatre Club, 53 Watteau, Antoine, 45, 46 Weigel, Helen, 187 n. 4 Weiss, Peter, 67 Welfare State, 73 Wesker, Arnold, 72 Whiting, John, 47; Penny for a Song, 47 Wilde, Oscar, 47; Salome, 46, Willeford, William, 190 n. 12 Willett, John, 53 William, David, 55, 18485 n. 8 Williams, Clifford, 67, 75, 182 n. 1, 187 n. 3 Williams, David, 45, 68, 71, 74, 131, 144, 14647, 15455 Williams, Tennessee, 130; A Streetcar Named Desire, 130 Williamson, Audrey, 45 Wolfe, George, 169 Woodall, James, 144 World Theatre, 24 Worth, Irene, 68 Worthen, W. B., 11 Worthington, Christa, 169 Wymark, Patrick, 58 Yacco, Sada, 117 Yamada, Isuzu, 123 yamato-e, 124 Zadek, Peter, 53 Zambrano, Ana Laura, 123, 124 Zeami, 21, 13941, 144, 167, 195 n. 10; Matsukaze, 19596 n. 2 Zefferelli, Franco, 89

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Prosperos True Preservers Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeares The

Newark: University of Delaware Press

Prosperos True Preservers

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Prosperos True Preservers

Newark: University of Delaware Press

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments CERTAINLY I AM NOT THE FIRST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT A BOOK OF

Prosperos True Preservers

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THIS WILL BE A STUDY OF SIX PRODUCTIONS OF THE TEMPEST STAGED

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

1: THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE TEMPEST

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

2: GIORGIO STREHLER: THE TEMPEST, 1948

IN 1945, WHEN PETER BROOK ENTERED THE PROFESSIONAL BRITISH

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

PROSPEROS TRUE PRESERVERS

3: PETER BROOK: THE TEMPEST, 1957

Prospero's

Prospero's