Dr Annaliese Connolly from Sheffield Hallam University joins 1623 artistic director Ben Spiller to introduce a screening of Julie Taymor's The Tempest at QUAD in March 2011

Ben Spiller:  Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to QUAD. My name is Ben Spiller and I'm the artistic director of 1623 theatre company. It is my great pleasure to introduce Julie Taymor’s latest film, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, along with 1623 board member Dr Annaliese Connolly from Sheffield Hallam University. Before I hand over to Annaliese, who will take you through the cinematic history of The Tempest before sharing her thoughts on Taymor’s approach to the play, I’d like to say a bit about 1623, what we do with Shakespeare, our relationship with QUAD and how The Tempest fits in with the development of Shakespeare’s theatrical career.

At 1623, we approach Shakespeare unusually and often perform his plays, or parts of them, in unusual places. Discovering new ways of connecting people to Shakespeare's language, characters and sense of theatre is what we're all about. We’ve performed Hamlet in a cave, Macbeth in an old mill, Romeo and Juliet in an art gallery, Shakespeare aerobics at festivals and Shakespeare love scenes at Glastonbury.

In the autumn of 2009, we performed Emergency Shakespeare! - a collection of perilous scenes from four of Shakespeare's plays - in and around the building here at QUAD, where volunteers from St John Ambulance stepped in to offer first-aid solutions. The production was revived last summer at the National Theatre as part of the Watch This Space Festival, before it won Best Live Event at the Creative Industries Network 2010 Awards.

The relationship between 1623 and QUAD has developed significantly since Emergency Shakespeare! as we're now based here. We're excited at the new possibilities that being based at an international arts centre - specialising in visual art and film - will create for further innovations in Shakespearean production.

So, The Tempest.  Shakespeare’s final play; more specifically, the final play that he wrote alone. Along with his other late plays, often called the ‘Late Romances’, Shakespeare’s main preoccupations towards the end of his career seem to be reunions and reconciliations. In The Winter’s Tale, Perdita – the daughter abandoned as a baby by her father – is reunited with her mother sixteen years later and her father promises to mend his ways.  Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline, discovers that she has two brothers who were kidnapped twenty years ago while her husband, who believed her to be adulterous and ordered her death, learns of her innocence and is forgiven by his wife. Pericles experiences an emotional reunion with his wife and daughter, both of whom he believed were dead. Prospero in The Tempest arranges for his brother, who usurped his dukedom, to arrive on his island so he can exact revenge on him; but, instead, he learns to forgive him. I find that the most moving moment in the play. “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance”.

What makes The Tempest stand apart from Shakespeare’s other Late Romances is the importance of magic. In most of the other plays, magic turns out to be fraudulent although often well-meant and there are also moments of divine intervention, perhaps most notably the appearance of Jupiter in Cymbeline and the goddess Diana in Pericles. In The Tempest, though, real magic is central to understanding the play. Prospero learns magic through his books, Ariel is a spirit who can fly and turn invisible, Caliban is the son of a witch and ‘the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that delight and hurt not’. Shakespeare provides directors and designers of The Tempest with the opportunity to create impressive spectacle in the magical moments of the play, which include the savage spirit-dogs that chase the king’s servants and Ariel’s sudden and nightmarish appearance as a harpy. With its potential for spectacle and special effects, The Tempest is perhaps Shakespeare’s most filmic play; it certainly lends itself incredibly well to cinematic interpretation and has inspired film-makers since the early twentieth century, as Annaliese will now explain.

Dr Annaliese Connolly:  During the twentieth century there were at least five film adaptations of The Tempest for the big screen and more than half a dozen adaptations for television, including the wonderful Animated Tales.

One of the earliest films of The Tempest was the black and white silent film made by Percy Stowe in 1908. The film lasts about 10 minutes and is concerned with the backstory of Prospero and the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand. Here, the characterisation of Prospero and Caliban closely followed the traditional stage history of the play from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the relationship between the two was a paternal one, with Prospero depicted as a benign, elderly wizard, and Caliban as his prodigal son, dark in colour, long haired and animalistic.  The depiction of Ariel also indicates the stage tradition of presenting Ariel as female, either as a fairy or angel, with the part performed by a child.

The three best-known films of The Tempest are the cult science-fiction fantasy Forbidden Planet made in 1956, Derek Jarman’s The Tempest of 1979 and Peter Greenaway’s  Prospero’s Books in 1991. What all of these films share, including Taymor’s most recent example, is a creative reimagining of Prospero’s story, which is shaped by the film’s own cultural moment of production and by a variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare’s play.

In the case of Forbidden Planet, this early science fiction film reinterprets Shakespeare’s island as the futuristic planet of Altair IV located in the twenty-third century, with Prospero as a space-travelling scientist.  Whilst during the early seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was writing his play, the Americas were the site of European colonisation, during the mid twentieth century the theme of exploration now applied to space and the galaxies beyond.  During the 1950s, the race was on between the opposing Cold War powers to send manned and unmanned expeditions to the moon.  In Forbidden Planet, Prospero has been transformed into Dr Morbius who arrives on the planet twenty years earlier to establish a colony there.  Following the mysterious deaths of his comrades, Morbius lives in seclusion with his young daughter Altaira  and Robbie the Robot, created by Morbius to perform household chores and other tasks and fulfils the role of Shakespeare’s Ariel.  A second expedition, led by Commander Adams, played by Leslie Neilson, is sent to locate Morbius after he lost contact with Earth and part of the film focuses upon the romance between Adams and Morbius’ daughter.

Although it is possible to trace analogies between the main characters and those of Shakespeare’s play, the film is unusual in that it doesn’t offer a character equivalent for Caliban, instead it expresses its interest in the idea that perhaps Caliban is an extension of Prospero’s own personality.  It does this by suggesting that the force which killed the members of the first expedition and annihilated the original inhabitants of the  planet known as the Krell, was in fact a product of Morbius’ own subconscious – a ‘monster from the Id’.  The evil on the planet is therefore an extension of his own mind and his own fears.  The film concludes with the simultaneous destruction of Morbius and Altara IV as Altara, Robbie and Commander Adams return to earth.

Derek Jarman’s film continues to explore the ways in which The Tempest lends itself to interpretations influenced by psychology.  Jarman develops the suggestion made in Forbidden Planet that Morbius’ subconscious was responsible for some of the events by indicating that all the characters and events are projections from Prospero’s own subconscious, particularly his dreams.  In this film the location underlines this internalised perspective as the action takes place in a stately home, Stoneleigh Manor, so that the island is no longer a physical location but an island of the mind: Prospero’s mind. For Jarman, Prospero is no longer an aging wizard and benevolent father but a younger man, who appears like a Romantic poet , with long hair and a brooding intellect.  The shadowy lit world of the house reflects Prospero’s interest in the occult and darker magic and his own darker emotions of revenge.  The editors of the Arden 3 edition of the play have suggested that Jarman’s interpretation of Caliban and Ariel as varieties of gay men reflect his own interest in representing a range of sexual identities in film.  Here, Ariel is a feminised gay man in a white boiler suit and gloves, while Caliban is depicted as an older gay queen with a chilling maniacal laugh.  Miranda was played as a self-assured young woman by Toyah Wilcox unperturbed by Caliban.  At the end of the film Prospero doesn’t leave the house-as-island and instead simply falls asleep to allow Ariel to sneak away.

Peter Greenaway’s film uses Prospero’s obsession with his library and its books as its starting-point to examine Prospero’s developing career as a magician and as the creator of Shakespeare’s playtext.   Casting the Shakespearean actor John Gielgud in the central role Greenaway returned to the image of Prospero as man coming to the end of his life. Greenaway’s decision is influenced in part by his interest in Shakespeare’s career and the status of The Tempest as Shakespeare’s last play and his final paean to the stage.  Gielgud delivers the lines for all the characters in voice over as though he is the dramatist rehearsing the different parts and stage managing events.

In the context of these various depictions of Prospero, Julie Taymor’s decision to re-imagine the figure of Prospero as a woman seems almost the next logical step in the play’s interpretive history since it opens up a series of new readings of the relationships between Prospera and her extended family of Caliban and Ariel.  Whereas the other three films I’ve mentioned were clearly influenced by the work of Freud and ideas about the human psyche, as well as Shakespeare’s own career, Taymor’s vision of the play indicates her interest in both post-colonial and feminist readings of Shakespeare’s play.

Taymor is a director and screenwriter who is not afraid to make controversial decisions and to offer new ways of thinking about Shakespeare that demonstrate his plays still have something pertinent to say to a twenty-first century audience.  Taymor began her career in the theatre as a director and her first play was a production of The Tempest in New York in 1986, followed by The Taming of The Shrew in 1988 and Titus Andronicus in 1994.

It was Titus Andronicus that was first adapted by Taymor for the big screen back in 1999. It is interesting that with Titus she selected Shakespeare’s first printed tragedy and with The Tempest his last single authored play.  Taymor took a risk with writing a screenplay for Titus as it  has been frequently labelled Shakespeare’s WORST play with critics often discussing the play’s violent scenes of mutilation in terms of Shakespeare’s own early career and his naivety.  Critics suggest that the young Shakespeare was merely  writing a revenge tragedy of the kind that were fashionable, like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and that he quickly moved away from this kind of playwriting.  Taymor tackles the question of how to depict the violence to a cinema audience who have become desensitised by their exposure to violent imagery in the media head on by forcing them to reflect upon their own relation to violent spectacle.  Taymor does this by mixing different acting styles, with brutally realistic scenes of violence such as Titus slitting the throats of Chiron and Demetrius with the stylised presentation of the rape of Titus' daughter Lavinia.

In The Tempest Taymor uses the island location (the film was shot on the islands of Hawaii) and the black actor, Djimon Hounsou, who plays Caliban, to offer a more complex interpretation of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban than the earlier films have allowed.  During the twentieth century, stage productions of the play have repeatedly interpreted the relationship between Prospero, Caliban and Ariel in terms of European imperialism with the island standing for any one of the numerous colonies of Britain or other western powers with Ariel and Caliban as members of the indigenous population.  This reading acquired political and cultural urgency in the aftermath of the fall of the British empire mid-way through the century.

Whilst traditionally Prospero’s magic has been contrasted positively against the dark magic of Sycorax, the witch who gave birth to Caliban on the island, the fact that Prospero is also now a female sorcerer serves to underline the similarities between these two characters and raise questions about how different are they and in turn suggest that perhaps there is little difference between Miranda and Caliban as Prospero’s children.  The parallels between Prospera and Sycorax also undermines the claim that is made by Prospera to the island.

By casting Helen Mirren as the female ruler of Milan, Taymor’s adaptation seems to be tapping into current interest in women in positions of political power.  In this sense, the film is drawing upon Mirren’s own filmography since she has already played Shakespeare’s Fairy Queen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1981 and more recently she has played Elizabeth the First for the Channel Four series in 2005 as well as Elizabeth II in The Queen in 2006. The connection between Mirren’s previous role as Elizabeth I and Prospera is signalled partly though the costuming with Prospera in a dark leather farthingale and bodice in the scenes in Milan as a female ruler and later on the island when she confronts her brother.  Interest in female rulers continues in the release later this year of the film The Iron Lady, the story of the career of Margaret Thatcher played by Meryl Streep. Taymor had also used this strategy in the casting of Antony Hopkins as Titus. Hopkins’ career had received a considerable boost from playing the role of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and there was interesting frisson between the cannibalistic killer and the Roman General turned chef who cooks two boys in a pie.

One of the joys of The Tempest whether discussing the playtext, a stage production or a new film are the endless possibilities it presents for interpretation and a fresh perspective, so sit back and enjoy this latest offering from Julie Taymor.

© 1623 theatre company, 4 March 2010.