This week, I finished the papier mache layers on Prospero and Antonio; had the first work session with Mikaela Bennett, who’s playing Miranda & Antonio, and Benjamin Stowe, who’s Ferdinand & Sebastian & Stephano; finished memorizing Prospero’s lines in Act One; watched film adaptations of The Tempest by Derek Jarman and Paul Mazursky; finished two books, one a compendium of text & performance notes by David Hirst, the other a series of interviews with directors, Directing Shakespeare; and watched 5 hours of video workshops by John Barton & Cecily Berry.

Miscellaneous thoughts emerging from all that:

• The challenge is to render the contradictions and incongruities in the text absolutely clear. The richness is in the paradox. Contradictions are to be painted vividly, not softened. Rather than tilting the balance by making Prospero more “sympathetic” or, on the other hand, writing him off as a despot, the play embraces all extremes.

• Prospero has the power to create storms, but not to force Miranda and Ferdinand’s love. He shows great wonder at “It works.”

• Does he intend forgiveness from the beginning. No evidence of that. He intends the bonding of Miranda and Ferdinand, but intensely feels the urge toward vengeance.

• Masque: It should bring up echoes of his own marriage, but the immediate interruption comes from the shadows of Caliban’s crew, and the storm intruding.

• Need to read Cornelius Agrippa’s On Occult Philosophy, which would be Prospero’s prime magical source, and Montaigne’s Of Cannibals . Possibility of using phrases from these in the soundscape.

• Miranda must be acutely attuned to every moment in Prospero’s behavior that’s uncharacteristic of him. In the first scene: his continual asking if she’s listening; his starting a sentence and getting caught up in verbiage, never ending it; his strangely inverted phrases; his sudden passions. She needs to continue this awareness of his development throughout the play, even as she’s becoming enrapt with Ferdinand.

• Hirst notes the irony that at the end, repentance is not by the villains but by the hero.

• Jarman’s use of a magical staff that contains a round magnifying lens. Moment of giving Miranda a vision of the past in this is very powerful. Could this be used in his narration to her, as if allowing her to see selected images?

• Mazursky’s Tempest is a contemporary adapation, kind of a fun film, but the only thing that really struck me as useful was a dark red sky at the beginning: using this hue as the predominant one in the opening storm video.

• For Miranda, the play is truly a series of Star Trek episodes: discovering a new version of the past, a new world, new creatures, a new all-powerful emotion, and her own will. To a lesser degree, every character in the play has undreamed-of doors opening to new worlds: Caliban and Ariel both to the potential of freedom, Ferdinand to lightning-struck love, Antonio to new treaty arrangements with Naples, Sebastian to the kingship, Stephano first to his newfound stash of fine booze and then to the potential of kingship, Trinculo to elevation from court fool to viceroy, Gonzalo to the moment-by-moment wonder of things, Prospero to the calming of his tempest. The “magic” of the play is in this sense of astonishment.

• Sense of Prospero’s intense time pressure—totally lacking in the Jarman film, so it’s all atmosphere, no sense of forward action. Brook notes “a tempest that sets off a series of events that are still within a tempest, even when the storm is done.”

• Prospero’s renunciation of magic carries great grief. It’s like leaving the priesthood, or as in our play Carrier, the Navy pilot leaving the service: he’ll never have an experience as intense, powerful or enrapturing all the rest of his life.

• In “Our revels now are ended,” Prospero intends it as a speech of comfort to the young people, upset by the sudden interruption of the masque. But he sees himself looking into a future without meaning, a nothingness, and he’s stunned by the vision.

• Possible elements to adapt from Jarman: Sound of the storm breathing. Prospero mumbling 1:1 lines as in a dream (may sometimes mumble lines along with others). Ariel very neutral in his vivid reports of the tempest. The extreme vulnerability of the (naked) Ferdinand at his entrance. Ferdinand in his second scene has been manacled. Patterns of candles (could be projected). Grotesqueness of Ariel and Prospero both barking as dogs as we see only the reactions of the clowns, no actual dogs. Before the banquet, sounds of a festive crowd, but nothing evident when they come to it. Caliban in the middle of eating at the beginning. At the end, the sense of a dawning.

• Ariel hypnotizes Alonso and Gonzalo (possibly a hand passing over face, accompanied by humming a tune), and he tries it with Antonio and Sebastian, but it doesn’t work: they’re armored against music. So he must improvise.

• Possibility of a form of bisected makeup of Caliban, so the face is radically different from one side to the other.

• Strehler’s use of waves emerging at end of the Harpy scene, threatening to envelop the men.

• From some staging: Courtiers flee, leaving behind garments which are picked up by Ariel to become the frippery the clowns dress in. Possibly just the hats, or maybe just Alonso’s crown. This would underline the political parallel.

• Jarman’s Miranda is very much a fifteen-year-old: radical mood shifts, very alert to each moment, willful and guarded but still vulnerable.

• Declan Donnellan talks of Shakespeare’s radical dramaturgy here, and needing a sense that the play itself is uncontrolled, creating itself.

• Ariel’s “Do you love me, Master, no?” is a real question. He has great curiosity about this emotion.

• Bring out all the images of bondage.

• Jonathan Miller speaks of colonialism attracting those who have a degree of infantilism: they are seeking control and gain it through power. Maturity—and Prospero’s path—is in finally surrendering the notion that you have control over nature. This his relinquishment of magic in the freeing of Ariel, the captured energy of nature. Before this, all are bound by the past. In the end, the future is possible.

• Peter Hall: “If you observe the rules [of verse speaking] you can make the plays very much quicker, very much shorter. The audience runs after the play, rther than trudges.”

• Peter Brook: Serving Shakespeare is serving the reality that Shakespeare is serving.