Lie there, my art

After the last few appalling days, I fled this evening to an all-student production of The Tempest, in the prettiest of half-round theatres.  It looks like something the Duchess of Newcastle might own for her private theatricals.  There's a photo in the lobby that I love, of a 1909 all-girl production of The Merchant of Venice by the Radcliffe Idlers Club, enthralled with their beards and tights.  Liberation!  They all look so dizzy with joy.

This Tempest was a swift little ship of a production:  two and a quarter hours, no intermission.  No masque.  I liked the part of the set that was about a cord of old books, a rock on which to sit or stand; I was somewhat bemused by the shelves full of tchotchkes upstage.  What, they brought a boatload of old bric-a-brac?  I did not much care for the recorded sound track (very filmic) which was a trifle over loud.  Those words don't need it.

The actors were all about nineteen, with no effort made to distinguish generations.  Prospero looked like Miranda's brother, in torn jeans and a paint-splotched T-shirt.  He'd modeled himself on Mark Rylance, I think:  that soft-voiced hesitant unherdness.  (I liked when he had to turn his back to Gonzago and laugh, so as not to hurt the poor old fellow's feelings; yet he was almost crying:  dear gods, he hasn't changed a bit.)  He could speak the verse.

Ariel, alas, could not:  at least not beautifully.  Damn.  Adequately is inadequate.  But oh, she could move!  Years of ballet, I should think.  She had that dancer's trick of keeping her face always toward you, and could leap and land like thistledown.  And was an excellent flautist besides:  that she could enchant with.  She looked rather like a Teenier Buffalo, but had to speak all her songs.  Damn.

They cast a woman as Caliban, but kept his pronoun.  Tough to bring off--people the island with Calibans, how?--but she was good:  rageful and feral and farouche.  She could do an unshrill anger:  which many women can't.  She played him as damaged--as mutant--as if some horrific teratogen had malformed him, body and spirit:  and she dimly knew it.  As if Sycorax's womb itself were bathed in poisons.  And she played him as land-crippled, dragging herself along in a shapeless gray robe, half Wyeth's Christina and half selkie.  The hair though, was pure Helena Bonham-Carter.

Antonio was fascinating.  He looked (and sounded) like some half-remembered actor from a German film of the early thirties:  elegant, epicene, decadent.  Black patent-leather hair, white insolent face.  Like the love-child of Peter Lorre and Richard E. Grant.  Full thirties evening dress, with pumps.

Trinculo was good, an immensely long fellow in a tiny Arlecchino's jacket.  He could tumble, too.

But I fell in love with their Stephano, who had the voice and presence of a music hall star:  a small, shrewd, raucous Yorkshirewoman in a disgraceful morning coat.  You could see the remnants of command in her, the true butler's port and bearing, wried about thirty degrees out of true:  by port.  She could have ruled Milan (far better than Prospero), were it not she had bad sack.  I spoke briefly with her afterward, and she was English but not Northern: her mimickry was fooking flawess.

And I liked the design of the piece:  art as magic, magic as art.  As we came in, Prospero was painting at an easel on the stage, as Ariel flitted to and fro with paints, and Miranda slept.  He was in some creative vortex:  getting something down which possessed him.  His picture was turned from us:  but was clearly the storm.  Then he rose and slammed the canvas down—crack!—on the stage, and that was the thunderclap:  so the play began.  His robe was his painting shirt.  All of Ariel's masques and transformations were paintings:  of goddesses, of monsters.  There was a canvas downstage, flat out on the floor, at which Prospero worked, at which nearly everyone worked.  Miranda and Ferdinand painted side by side with small neat brushes, like children with a glorious new project (let's paint all of Narnia!):  their ardor expressed in exquisite carefulness.  As their love is in the text.

And at end, when everyone had gone, Caliban dragged on, and took possession of the paints:  slashing, scrawling, splashing, smearing, slapping with both hands.  Mine mine mine mine...

Nine