About four years ago, when I was in the rare books library at Mystic Seaport making some notes that eventually turned into At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, I wanted to write the entire book on The Tempest. And, really, to be even more extreme, I wanted to write the whole thing about the first scene.
I’ve never seen the storm scene done well on stage (it was the low point of the great Bridge Project Tempest last year at BAM, and also of the engaging RSC production with Patrick Stewart I saw in London a few years ago). As I read it, the scene exposes the chaos and disruption at the play’s core. “We split,” say the wet mariners, and at this moment — before the magus & his emotive daughter & the air spirit & etc arrive to explain & clarify & order everything — disorder rules the stage. In production that have Prospero on the stage in 1.1 — as he was in the Sam Mendes/Bridge version, as in many others — it short-circuits the scene. We shouldn’t have anyone visible to trust.
So many choices — I wrote about the Boatswain’s technical maritime language (“yar!”) in Shakespeare’s Ocean, and I’ve read good explanations of the scene’s anti-monarchism (“What cares these roarers for the name of king?”). Alonso’s plea for theatrical authority (“Where’s the master?”), Antonio’s rough individualism (“Hang, cur, hang”), and Gonzalo’s weepy plea for “long heath, brown furze” all amount to different efforts to wring chaos into order.
But there’s a brief moment here, before Miranda & Prospero come on stage, when it’s not clear that any order is forthcoming. That’s the wrack really does wreck everything. That that play really investigates the meaning of being “lost at sea” (to borrow a phrase). That’s what I don’t think anyone has managed to capture on stage.
I wonder what it would be like to try to stage it underwater.
The only time I’ve seen it staged well was at American Shakespeare Center. They had two ropes hanging from the ceiling and that was it. There was no other set or props, sound effects, nothing. They keep the lights up during performance, too. So there was just the text and the actors and the audience imagining the storm together. And it was extraordinary. I think problems crop up when a director tries to create the storm — no one’s going to be able to create on stage better than what we can create in our imagination. Instead of creating something for the audience to watch, I prefer inviting the audience to take an active role in creating the show.
Interesting that you point out staging it underwater. I’ve heard of a few companies performing actually at the shore of a lake and using the water in the staging — though I think it may have been Twelfth Night and not The Tempest. Our performance space this summer (though not actually ON the shore of the lake) was right by Schroon Lake and when we were able to perform outside, it was a beautiful backdrop. Sometimes I wondered if it might end up being more distracting because it wasn’t neutral.
If I may boast, the best version I ever saw of the shipwreck scene was done by a bunch of 10 year olds at the “Shakespeare Camp” of Imagination Stage here in DC. The challenge given to the group was to enact the scene with no props and to make the audience feel the peril. The actors dressed in black (of course) and used a simple black stage. They simulated the heaving sea through coordinated, sudden movements back and forth, as if the stage were rising and falling. It took very little time before the audience was convinced that it was.
OK some parental pride: my son was the Boatswain.
I think I saw something along those lines, doubtless not as good, in the storm scenes of a Japanese-themed *Pericles* at BAM a few years back, using coordinated movement and some long ropes suspended from above. As Tara suggested also, sometimes less is more. Certainly the RSC/Patrick Stewart production, which used film footage of a 20c gunship in heavy seas, was too much technology.