Free The Tempest by William Shakespeare

remains one of the great challenges for major actors. Having played the part in America many years before, Patrick Stewart returned to it for the RSC in 2006, and in so doing proved that television and movie work (and fame) does not necessarily ruin an actor’s ability to perform in the theater. His appearance was described as reminiscent of “some kind of shabby Lapland shaman, clad in a bearskin cloak and reindeer-skull headdress, raising the spirits from a burning brazier.” 57 His performance imbued the part with depth and humanity:
    Stewart proceeds to give a fine performance. True, you feel he’s fibbing when he says that as duke of Milan he preferred books to politics, but he catches what really matters. Here’s a Prospero with fierce feelings—doting father, bullying slave-master, proud magus, angry avenger—and the power to exercise them absolutely. Yet in the end he sacrifices control, accepts his own humanity, renounces revenge and, despite having captured the men who exiled him, forgives them. 58
Caliban and Ariel Onstage
    When researching the part of Caliban for the RSC’s 1978 production, David Suchet made a startling discovery:
    Imagine my horror when I discovered that Caliban had been played as: (1) a fish, (2) a dog with one and/or two heads, (3) a lizard, (4) a monkey, (5) a snake, (6) half-ape, half-man, with fins for arms, (7) a tortoise. These were just a few of the extreme interpretations. I, once again, began to feel rather depressed but I did manage a smile when I read that, when Caliban had been portrayed as a tortoise, Prospero would turn him on his back when he became unruly. 59
    Ariel and Caliban have been adapted to fit a multitude of different physical representations. The stage relationship between Prospero and these amorphous creatures has driven, and been driven by, twentieth-century critical interpretations of the play, whether it be Darwinian, Freudian, or colonial. The outdated Darwinian reading that Suchet hints at above has all but become extinct. However, Freudian interpretations continue, presenting Ariel and Caliban as elementals conjured from Prospero’s subconscious. In Adrian Noble’s 1998 production this was indicated through costume design:
    Scott Handy’s sweet-voiced Ariel and Robert Glenister’s anguished Caliban look like positive and negative photographic images of each other, both dressed in unflattering loin cloths, the one covered in white body-paint, the other in black slime.There is the suggestion that they are different aspects of Prospero’s psyche, the super ego and the id perhaps. 60
    In many productions the costumes of Ariel and Caliban are designed to link in with Prospero’s own attire. In one sense, there is the practical idea of Prospero clothing the natives to so-called civilized standards with his castoffs. But, for the audience it creates a physical and psychological link between the characters, where “in its most reductive form, Ariel is his superego, [and] Caliban his libido.”
    To increase the dramatic tension in the play, the majority of productions performed in the last fifty years have chosen to have a male actor play Ariel. “From the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth, the part of Ariel was a coveted female role … the cultural significance of gender and changing attitudes toward the power relationships in the play” 61 account for this shift in casting. Subjecting one man to the servitude of another automatically creates a tension, a power struggle that results in resentful servitude. Prospero, as a result, becomes an isolated figure, constantly at odds with those who wish him to relinquish his power over them. In the 1993 production Alec McCowen’s Prospero could not
    afford to be complacent. Although he succeeds in controlling his world, his magic needs to be “rough” because in addition to a thuggish Ariel, he has to control a terrifying Caliban and an unusually outspoken daughter. His wand doubles as a