Simon Russell Beale’s return to the Royal Shakespeare Company after 20 years has been overshadowed by excitement about the production’s use of digital technology. While the effects are innovative, for me the kaleidoscopic visual spectacle pales besides the show’s human values and its moving affirmation of forgiveness.
Director Gregory Doran rightly points out that Shakespeare’s play includes a masque that would have used the latest stage machinery. Accordingly, he has collaborated with Intel and the Imaginarium Studios to create an Ariel whose human form is given an ethereal shape. We see the actor, Mark Quartley, on stage, but his living presence is simultaneously translated into a computer-generated image that floats across solid surfaces and takes on multiple forms: we witness him stuck in a cloven pine, turning into a broad-winged bat and spreading flame through the sky. It is all impressive, even if it creates the odd sense that we are watching a double Ariel.
Fears that the technology would upstage the actors are firmly scotched by the presence of Beale as Prospero. He has the capacity not only to act mind but to convey moral gravity. The part requires the actor to suggest an internal struggle to compensate for the lack of outward drama, but Beale is also exceptional in stressing Prospero’s private guilt. He dwells on the phrase “twelve year” as if appalled at his prolonged exile, but also lets us see that it was Prospero’s bookish solitude that provoked his usurpation.
Beale, however, is at his finest in the play’s later stages. His hands beat his temples in self-reproach at creating a time-consuming masque. When he is confronted by his old enemies, thoughts of revenge evaporate in pity at their plight. Even better is his treatment of his former servitors. When Beale tells Ariel “I shall miss thee” it is with an aching sense of loss. His attitude towards Joe Dixon’s memorably sad Caliban is also less that of colonial tyrant than sorrowing mentor. As a quaking Caliban appears before him expecting punishment, he greets him with a simple “No.” As a result, we extend our own charity to this troubled, pensive Prospero when he begs release by prayer.
Famously, when Beale himself played Ariel in 1993, his final gesture was to spit in Prospero’s face, as if freedom were a right rather than a gift. There is no such anger in Quartley’s Ariel who, with his swept-back cockatoo hair and fleetness of foot, is even more compelling in his corporeal than in his digitised shape.
Doran also invests the shipwrecked courtiers with unusual human detail. Joseph Mydell’s Gonzalo is no prating worthy but a shrewd politician visibly wincing at the offhand racism of his fellow Italians, and Tom Turner makes the would-be usurper, Sebastian, a slow-witted assassin. The comedy also comes off well in the hands of Simon Trinder as a nimble Trinculo and Tony Jayawardena as a power-fixated Stephano.
Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design, with its surround of a ship’s ribs, orchestrates the visual spectacle. But while the show offers a bonanza night for ardent techies, I see its use of advanced technology as a one-off experiment rather than a signpost to the future. In the end, we look to the theatre for emotional engagement, and what I shall remember from this production is Beale’s haunting portrait of culpable negligence and comprehensive mercy.
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