Lucinda Fenton braves the Durham weather for The Bailey Theatre Company’s version of The Tempest…

one way to engage an audience! | good chemistry | taken aback

One way to engage an audience!
The Tempest is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays; it appears a mere slip of a thing compared with some of his more bloodthirsty offerings, but delve deeper and you discover a wonderful work concerned with justice, forgiveness and redemption. It is often seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre as so potently symbolised in Prospero’s breaking of his staff, and so giving up his powers. With this in mind I trekked to St John’s on a suitably wet and windy night to see how the Bailey Theatre Company would fare with it.

Directors Charlotte Smith and Rebecca Udy obviously saw the fragile potential of the play, and used a troupe of dancers throughout the play in order to demonstrate the ethereal otherness of Prospero’s isle. The opening shipwreck scene would have been near impossible to do well in Leech Hall, hence I thought it was an inspired idea to recreate the sense of a shipwreck using the dancers. The only downside was that the music used (Massive Attack I believe) didn’t build up enough menace, leading one of my fellow audience members to comment: ‘I wasn’t scared. I was, however, a little turned on.’
Well it’s certainly one way of engaging a fickle Durham audience!

The spirits and nymphs reappeared at certain intervals throughout the play, and in one particularly memorable scene they all crowded around Prospero, caressing and worshipping him, helping the audience to gain a glimpse of his power. When the nymphs were not on stage, they were often in the auditorium, creating an all-pervasive sense of the magic of Prospero’s isle.

The part of Ariel, Prospero’s personal servant, and the most important of these spirits, is also probably among the most difficult parts in the play, for the character is very sexually ambiguous, is not quite of this world, and yet, is driven by the very human desire to break free from Prospero’s control. The part calls for a floaty, sprightly creature, constantly moving, hard to pin down, which is exactly what this production (in which Arial is a ‘she’ played by Sarah Cody) attempted to do. Unfortunately the movements themselves became repetitive and without purpose, which is always a dangerous trap to fall into on stage.

Good chemistry
However Ariel and Prospero (George Woods) did have a good onstage chemistry, and even added an element of sexual frisson, which came out particularly well when they began to mirror the newly-ignited, and seemingly much more innocent, lust of Miranda and Ferdinand. The latter couple conveyed together a touching sense of the budding of new love. Amy Normand as Miranda was especially impressive; dressed in a perfect raggedy white dress, she really captured the
sweet innocence of the young girl utterly enchanted by the arrival of all these visitors on her island. The enormous height difference between her and Prospero really helped to create the sense of a father-daughter bond, which came out especially strongly when she was sitting in his lap, the perfect image of a child enraptured by her father’s story.

Moving from touchingly emotional to riotously drunk, some of the production’s most enjoyable scenes came in the form of Mark Quartley, Mark Everitt and Andrew Goy playing Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano respectively.
The acting verged on the over-acting – playing drunk on stage is a bloody hard thing to do – but it generally stayed on the right side of pantomime, and I enjoyed the arch-campness created by Trinculo and Stephano. Good comic moments were created; for example when Quartley’s pathetic and mildly idiotic Caliban knelt down in homage to a perhaps even more idiotic Stephano.

In comparison, the royal scenes weren’t quite as strong although it was a nice directorial touch to have Sebastian singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ over the top of Gonzalo’s (Henrietta Pringle) pompous speech. The two actors who stood out from these scenes were Nick Robson as Sebastian and Alistair MacIver as Alonso; they both fleshed out their characters well, Nick as the dastardly schemer and Alistair as a man grief-stricken by the apparent loss of his son Ferdinand.

Taken aback
My one big gripe with this production of The Tempest was with the ending. The climax of the play comes when Prospero forgoes his powers in order to return to Milan, and the shift in mood should be powerfully evident, but unfortunately there was little reaction or emotion on stage, even from Prospero himself. Similarly the mood was lost in Shakespeare’s moving epilogue when the cast suddenly turned their backs on us, and Prospero’s epilogue was voiced over. This epilogue is an incredibly touching, personal plea during which Prospero should have every audience member in the palm of his hand – hard when you’re not even facing them.

However I don’t want my disagreement with the final directional decisions to mar my overall impression of the play. Both the comedy and the pathos of The Tempest were skilfully brought out, and the whole play was a visual delight; plaudits must go especially to Tom Bristow, for designing a fantastic set that evoked, as the whole production did, the sense of a shipwreck and of an island filled with ethereal spirits.