As a schoolchild in the late ‘90s I swear to god I saw a production of The Tempest – I think at Malvern Theatre – that mostly consisted of Prospero and his villainous brother Antonio playing chess together, while the rest of the play kind of happened around them.
It was so weird that I now occasionally doubt it actually happened. But also I’m pretty sure it did as I remember it so clearly. And Tim Crouch’s new production of The Tempest brought it to mind: I think it might baffle a lot of people, but I doubt any of them will forget it in a hurry.
We’re in a junk-cluttered study of some sort, presumably on the nameless island that Crouch’s Prospero and his daughter Miranda (Sophie Steer) were exiled to by his sister Antonia (a gender swap, obvs). Their unearthly servants Caliban and Ariel are there too, though whether there’s anything supernatural about them is questionable: Naomi Wirthner’s Ariel is a colourfully dressed older lady with NHS specs and a penchant for knitting; Faizal Abdullah’s Caliban is an affable guy in a Gascoigne shirt who occasionally drifts into passages of Malay.
They appear to be acting out The Tempest. That is to say, they’re using objects in the study to recreate the usual start of the play, which follows Antonia’s ship as it wrecks during the titular storm. Everyone is going through their lines with varying degrees of enthusiasm: Steer’s deliciously gauche Miranda flings herself in with total abandon; Ariel and Caliban seem benignly happy to go along; Crouch’s Prospero… odd. He hangs around in the background, more peripheral than usual, and yet he seems much more deeply invested than anyone else, his voice cracking with emotion as he details the scheme that laid him low, often muttering along passionately with whoever the speaker is.
It’s a leftfield but fun read that hinges, I think, on the line ‘I must once in a month recount what thou hast been’. Shakespeare absolutely did not mean to suggest the characters were meeting up monthly to tell themselves the story of The Tempest. But the line is kind of there!
After a while they stop using objects to tell the story. Instead, Crouch’s Prospero starts summoning audience members (planted actors, not unwitting audience participants, don’t worry) to fill the roles that had hitherto been taken by inanimate objects. Ferdinand is an usher. Antonia is an annoying woman who’d been on her phone. Stephano and Trinculo are boozy Eurotrash pretending not to understand English so they can sit in better seats.
It’s very clever and metatextual and Crouchian. Is there any ‘real’ magic here? Is Ariel an all-powerful spirit? Is Prospero casting spells? It’s made apparent that Ariel’s dramatic ‘ministers of fate’ speech involves a load of lo-fi special effects, visibly handcranked by the cast. The only obvious magic is Prospero summoning audience members. But is he an exiled magician, conjuring phantasms? Or is he Tim Crouch, performing this play in a room full of people, ‘summoning’ actors he himself cast? The answer is both, and it’s a duality that’s probed and prodded enthusiastically by Crouch. A dummy’s reading of his work is that everything he’s ever done boils down to the questions ‘what is performance, and why?’, and this is no exception.
Is this an accessible way of telling the story? I mean in all honesty probably not: I imagine if you’re not familiar with The Tempest you might struggle to gather exactly what the plot was supposed to be.
But the characterful cast work hard to bridge the gap. The verse speaking is uniformly superb. Steer is a pure delight: she’s the Evel Knievel of stage actors, approaching every line and direction like a death defying stunt - you feel thrilled for her when her gawky physicality and thunderously naive line deliveries land to full effect rather than crash and burn bafflingly. And Crouch is great – his Prospero has an almost busybodyish presence at first, a man who believes he’s been wronged and initially approaches the scenario like a particularly embittered middle manager. Is he in charge? Nominally, yes - after ‘summoning’ the audience cast members he often whispers their lines or gives them cues and looks pleased at their progress. But in the second half things start to slide: he flinches painfully from Antonia, obviously in distress; by the time the usually happy ending comes around he’s bellowing and belligerent, losing it as the conjured apparitions slink off.
It’s a cerebral and uncompromising – but pretty funny! – Tempest from a man who has devoted his life to deconstructing the nature of theatre in the way that some physicists devote their lives to smashing atoms. Again, it’s not going to be for everyone, but moaning about that feels meaningless. It’s Tim Crouch! Of course it’s not massively commercial. And if you can’t do a slight confounding meta-Tempest in the second space at the Globe, where can you do one?
