The use of new skills or the unearthing of forgotten resources? What makes the bigger difference to theatre? This is put to the test in productions by the Donmar Warehouse and the RSC. Both will affect the way Shakespeare is staged in the future. One of them makes a difference to the way we see the world.
Phyllida Lloyd’s Shakespeare Trilogy is one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years. Most rousing, most intricate when the plays are seen together in one compelling day. In the Donmar’s resounding temporary 420-seat theatre at King’s Cross – a big box with girders – Lloyd adds one new production, The Tempest, to two she made earlier, and consolidates a triumph.
Her all-female Julius Caesar, first seen in 2012, and Henry IV (2014) changed the stage at a stroke. Women had taken on the mightiest of Shakespearean male roles before: it was clear that an exceptional actress could scale the heights. These productions proved something more essential: that the norm did not have to be male. They also showed how arbitrary our sense of difference is. The news was about gender. With your eye and ear on that, it was easy to overlook the fact that the stage was being remade in other ways: full of round as well as skinny bodies, black and brown as well as white. That Scots and Irish inflections were not restricted to subordinates. Good actors make you notice the differences between characters, not the differences the actors bring to a show.
And these actors are terrific. Harriet Walter is the linchpin. A riven Brutus. A desolated Henry IV. A Prospero haunted by ideas of freedom. Her face seems to have more moving parts than anyone else’s. She scarcely gestures; she is sleek as a needle. Yet she is liquidly graceful when, in a moment of what might have been, she waltzes with Jackie Clune’s self-advertising, Trump-alike Caesar. Jade Anouka also crackles across all three productions: a startling, heart-catchingly young Mark Antony; a Hotspur springing around the stage as if she had helium in her heels; an Ariel who sizzles as she beatboxes, and melts into Where the Bee Sucks. Karen Dunbar is one of the discoveries of the evening: an actor without vanity, and with complete concentration. She is distilled contempt as Casca; utter sleaze as Bardolph.
The intensity of these cut-down productions is searing. Julius Caesar, bloody in action but often emotionally bloodless, becomes a play in which something more than the state is at stake. Conspirators and lovers are transfixed by each other. Clare Dunne’s Irish Portia lights up the argument about unheard voices, making a vital intelligence of this forcefully pleading wife. No wonder Walter’s Brutus is depleted by her death.
Crucial confrontations are enclosed in white light, held as if in a bubble, acted as if on one long breath. In The Tempest, the scenes between Leah Harvey and Sheila Atim as Miranda and Ferdinand are spellbinding. In an evening where there is a swelling feeling of ensemble, there is also delicacy and intimacy. No contradiction there, as the wonderful rendering of the Glasvegas song Daddy’s Gone shows: begun as a sad solo, it gradually draws in the entire cast. Solitariness turns into solidarity.
Something else binds these disparate plays together. All are presented as if performed in a prison by inmates: statements by actual prisoners connecting their lives to the stories on stage are read out. Suddenly you see that everyone in The Tempest is a captive, physically or emotionally. Suddenly you see that Henry’s crown is a jailer. Suddenly these plays are wired unforgettably into the 21st century.
Gregory Doran’s production of The Tempest (Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) is another kind of landmark. The moment when, thanks to cooperation between the RSC, Intel and the Imaginarium Studios, technology was harnessed to represent the otherworldly, the world of spirits. The fairy and the human as two different elements.
Mark Quartley’s Ariel is a mottled grey creature, a silky sprite who might have been painted by William Blake. He slides around the stage with the sinuousness of a dancer and sings his Where the Bee Sucks with relish, as if he couldn’t wait to lie in a cowslip’s bell. His costume contains sensors that enable live performance capture. Across the stage is his computer-generated counterpart, weightless as a swimmer, twisting and sliding from roof to floor in a gauzy tube. He morphs into a gigantic harpy. He twists out of the cloven pine like a root coming to life. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design is washed with mottled ocean colours and covered in lusciously coloured landscapes.
Doran cites masques – “the multimedia events of their day” – as an inspiration for the spectacle. This unfashionable theatrical form has recently had another memorable staging, in Lucy Bailey’s Comus at the Globe. But spectacle, exciting and gaudy, pales beside Simon Russell Beale’s Prospero. Hunched with guilt and grief, he looks at Ariel – a part he once played – as if he were seeing a sliver of himself. He unleashes a roar of pain as if his own spirit were bursting into freedom. He gives us what the rest of the production does not. Something fully human. Something that we can’t get on our screens.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Shakespeare Trilogy ★★★★★
The Tempest ★★★
- Shakespeare Trilogy is at the Donmar at King’s Cross theatre, London until 17 December
- The Tempest is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 21 January 2017, at the Barbican, London, 30 June to 18 August 2017, and in cinemas from 11 January 2017
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