The Shakespeare Readers will next read The Tempest (complete text available online from MIT)
When: Sunday, March 18, 1-4 p.m.
Where: American University's Bender Library, Room 306 (parking in the lot at Nebraska and New Mexico avenues is free on Sundays)
RSVP: Cindy Wagner, hosaajoy 'at' gmail.com
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Scholar Harold Bloom describes The Tempest (along with A Midsummer Night's Dream) as being the most visionary of Shakespeare's comedies but also "the worst interpreted and performed." (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, page 662).
But as my mind gusts back to the one staging I have experienced, I can only agree to disagree. The late Sir John Wood's humanistic 1988 Prospero was powerful and poignant, the Royal Shakespeare Company's staging was athletic and breathtaking.
In The Guardian's obituary for Wood, Michael Coveney wrote:
Wood's Prospero, in The Tempest directed by Nicholas Hytner (making his RSC debut) in 1988, struck me as the best I had ever seen – and I had seen Gielgud in the role, twice. His Prospero was a demented stage manager on a theatrical island, suspended between smouldering rage at his usurpation and unbridled glee at his alternative ethereal power. He bound the entire play to his wrecked view of experience and had no qualms about playing up and down the vocal register – in the dark backward and abysm of time we did indeed plummet several throaty fathoms deep. The critic Irving Wardle said that Wood lit up the text like an electric storm, and simply had no rival as a source of nervous energy on a stage.
John Wood:1983 Photograph Allstar-Cinetext
In any case, it was a thrill for this Bardophile to experience that lit-up text.
My favorite line:
TRINCULOServant-monster! the folly of this island! They
say there's but five upon this isle: we are three
of them; if th' other two be brained like us, the
state totters.
Hee!
In Bard we trust,
Cindy
