I'm pretty sure that The Tempest was my first exposure to Shakespeare. We read parts of it in grade 6 and it left an impression on me which penetrated, I'm convinced, beyond the idea of 'reading Shakespeare' to something of the magic lying beneath it. I don't recall which part or parts I read, but I do remember how the words made me feel.
So it was an auspicious beginning for the Bard and I. Notwithstanding that, though, and notwithstanding a succession of other Shakespeare throughout school - as far as I can remember, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet in year 9, Macbeth and maybe Richard III in year 10, King Lear in year 11 and then Hamlet in year 12, I think - and various exposures (though not as many as you'd think if you'd never been a Melbourne Uni English student) at uni, I've never been one to truly love his work. There are people of my age who genuinely have a feel for Shakespeare and unequivocally believe his greatness; I am not one of them.
But, to state the obvious, it's Shakespeare (and if there were some way of 'double capitalising' that name, I would) and so we all know him anyway, and his plays are fundamental to our experience of literature, art and life, whether or not we're aware of it at any particular time and whatever the 'intrinsic' merits or qualities they may possess, or once have possessed...so when I was looking at the Bell program for this year, I thought that it might be good to check some of it out and earmarked The Tempest as particularly likely to be rewarding; saw their Romeo and Juliet but then, feeling overrun by everything, gave up on organising for The Tempest; happily, Swee Leng had her act together (so to speak), so I caught it with her last Friday, along with a friend of hers, one Rob S (some very young-seeming uni friends of the latter also being around but elsewhere, having student rushed it on the night).
And it turned out to be good - better, I think, than the company's staging of Romeo and Juliet (although these kinds of comparisons are always to a certain extent a matter of apples and oranges). Set design was impressive - an appropriately enchanted forest, replete with obscured doors and hatches - and took on different characters throughout as the play required with some effective use of lighting and shadow effects (the way that the whole backdrop flickered when magic was being done was especially neat). Costumes generally quite thematically consistent - Caliban as a tall, angular British punk rocker in a white suit, complete with mohawk, somehow made sense, but was the exception rather than the rule in needing to have sense made of it - and relatively undistracting. Interesting choice to have the songs - as done by a (female) Ariel - rather Enya-esque (needless to say, with my long experience of ethereal female-voiced music, I could come up with more accurate comparisons - but that wouldn't be the point), and I wasn't sure about the reason for seemingly sending it up during the wedding scene...
I hadn't seen John Bell himself act before, so it was good to see him as Prospero - a fitting role. Freya Stafford as Miranda was about right, though I thought that Stephen Phillips as Ferdinand was a bit too much the footy player (but maybe that kind of swagger is more suited to the role than the lanugishings of a more expiring, sensitive romantic type). The rest of the cast good, also - most notably, those playing Caliban and Ariel. And the humour came through well, too.
The pacing seemed a bit off at the end - in particular, the ending seemed to begin quite early and then just keep on going, and there wasn't really a strong sense of climax at any stage - but, not being particularly familiar with the play, I don't know whether that was attributable to the play-text itself or to this particular staging. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and was interested to notice how thought-provoking it was - regardless (as above) of the extent to which this was due to 'the play itself' as opposed to its subsequent endless reproductions and reifications...
