La tempête

A wonderful version of The Tempest. The atmosphere mkes it striking. The ragged old dark palace where it's set. The gothic punk acting. The excitement, drama, and passion it adds to the play. It brings out the mythical and magical side in a playful way, with a dark gothic flavour. Those expecting a costume drama and Shakespeare play in theatre wan't like it. They won't see the humour and drama. Those who remember the seventies will love its hilarious festive playfullness.

This film version of Shakespeare's play opens on an island where Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been exiled for many years along with their servant Caliban and a spirit called Ariel. Prospero is rightfully the Duke of Milan and a powerful sorcerer and while he sleeps a storm at sea wrecks a ship near the island. Aboard are the men he blames for his exile; including the King of Naples and his son Ferdinand. Ferdinand is separated from the others and captured by Prospero and accused of being a spy; Miranda vouches for him and gradually falls in love with him. Meanwhile others survivors plot against their king and Caliban plans to kill Prospero, who he claims stole the island from him. This is the only version of 'The Tempest' that I've seen so I can't say how good an adaption it is; I can however say that it won't be for everybody. It is a bit confusing at first then as things are explained things start to make sense and finally as it ends one is left wondering how much of what we've seen was meant to be real and how much was meant to be the creation of a deranged mind! The film sometimes feels more like a TV play than a film; although I don't imagine a TV play made in the '70s would feature as much nudity. The cast do a solid job; I particularly liked Toyah Wilcox's portrayal of a punkish Miranda and Jack Birkett's disturbing performance as Caliban. Overall I'd say viewers some will love it some will hate it… give it a go and decide for yourself.

"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines." Those are the directions that Hamlet gives the players on how to perform the Mousetrap. While the rhythms of Elizabethan English are difficult for Americans, they seems to come naturally for British actors, and those here perform it well enough. The problems with this production arise, as they often do for THE TEMPEST, from the director's efforts to make it visually striking. Because of the magic that lies at the heart of Shakespeare's autumnal work, its gorgeous language has fallen prey to people who think the best way to stage it is to think what Quentin Crisp would sneer at as too camp and turn it up a couple of notches. One Shakespeare in the Park staging required a dozen people to play Ariel, including a Sumo wrestler; and Peter Greenaway's gloss on the play, PROSPERO'S BOOK, is so bad that when I saw it with some friends, I disrupted the occasion by guffawing at the over-the-top images. They show up here, too. What all these geniuses fail to realize is that the play is a boy-meets-girl story, something Shakespeare wrote several dozen times. At its core is a coming-of-age story for Miranda, an adolescent girl who is old enough to leave her father. She is confronted by various male archetypes before settling on the only boy her own age. The Bard of Avon's message is so normal, that like should marry like, that youth calls to youth and that Show Business is the process of taking these ordinary and important stories and making us pay for them by wrapping them in mystery ... well, so normal that people miss the point. The play's real magic is the story of Rapunzel and Snow White and all the other fairy tales which Bruno Bettelheim has shredded to show their symbolic content. That and the language. These should be enough for anyone like me, who cares for these things. It's too bad that the people who produced this version either don't care about Shakespeare or think that no normal person will.