The Tempest
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Othello
Hackney Empire
No accident, one guesses, that the RSC comes good in the new year with two of Shakespeare’s most racially sensitive plays in touring productions that, happily, are at once bold and deeply rewarding.
‘A Tempest roars out of Africa’, trumpeted the Telegraph’s headline to a preview of a production hailing from Cape Town’s famous Baxter Theatre. And the headline gets it right, for the identification of Prospero’s spirits with a dazzling conjuration of African tribal magic brings a buzz to the play that fits perfectly with Antony Sher’s terrific debut in the leading role. As with the RSC’s recent welcoming to Stratford of a Japanese Titus Andronicus, an Arabian Richard III and an Indian Midsummer Night’s Dream, the rediscovery of Shakespeare through foreign eyes yet again proves a revelation.
It’s a rare staging these days that doesn’t crank up The Tempest as a metaphor for colonialism, but the South African ‘truth and reconciliation’ context has produced a very fair take on the competing claims to the isle of Caliban and Ariel as indigenous blacks and Prospero who, after all, only had his role as colonialist thrust upon him by his wicked brother. What matters is that the director Janice Honeyman, Sher’s sometime South African classmate, creates no agitprop but simply a brilliant theatrical entertainment. Prospero only has to wave his staff for the stage to erupt with exotic musical rhythm accompanying a veritable carnival of maskers, towering puppets and fabulous animals.
Sher’s richly bewhiskered Prospero is not above being swept up in the partying of his joyously cackling and whooping spirits. Swapping his magician’s cloak for a battered panama he becomes an attentive gardener, fussing about his plot. This is not a displaced Olympian like Gielgud, but a roundly human figure, his authority tempered with humour and the capacity to be moved and to forgive. Against him, as it were, is John Kani’s formidable Caliban, crippled by servitude, yet every inch the noble savage, hymning the delights of the isle with gravely touching eloquence. Ariel is the wonderfully lithe and athletic Atandwa Kani. There’s hilarious clowning from Wayne van Rooyen’s Trinculo and Elton Landrew’s Stephano. Tinarie van wyk Loots is the delightfully fresh and eager Miranda, awestruck as she might well be by the sight of the magnificent torso of Charlie Keegan’s Ferdinand — no surprise that the programme credits him as one of Cosmopolitan’s ‘100 Hottest Men’ for 2008. Delights for all tastes in this exuberant production, one as rich in spectacle as in the crystalline delivery of the text — a rare treat these days. Unquestionably one of the hottest tickets for 2009.
Treacherous driving conditions across central England meant I couldn’t catch the RSC’s home-grown Othello until its appearance in the gilded Edwardian splendour of the Hackney Empire. Its director Kathryn Hunter turns in a reading whose provocations, no matter how extreme, are never less than arresting. The milieu is 1950s-ish with lots of khaki and unquestioned masculine supremacy.
Hunter emphasises an enduring tension between an avowedly Christian Venice and the alien cultural roots of its black military commander. Othello’s secret marriage to a Venetian jewel totally disgusts her blimpish father, Brabantio, and is wickedly burlesqued by his soldiers in a risqué barrack-room entertainment featuring a black-face crooner, a white ‘Judy’ doll and their progeny including, shock horror, a toy golly (pre-Carol T. one imagines). A brave satire against correctness raptly received, so far as I could tell, by a packed multi-ethnic matinée audience.
This is no more than a diversionary footnote to the main business of Othello’s entrapment by Iago, the latter role taken over from an indisposed Michael Gould by understudy Alex Hassall — a valiant effort, but conveying too little of the systemic malevolence. You were surprised that Patrice Naiambana’s impressive Othello, showing both magnetic power and a touching vulnerability, hadn’t long since demolished him with his fearsome whip.
It has to be said that the acting isn’t always up to the conception, the poetry too often playing second fiddle to the action. My companion well remarked that there’s ‘a sort of rude integrity to the performance that I found compelling’. That’s an apt judgment and a good omen for Kathryn Hunter’s future work as a new artistic associate of the RSC.
The Tempest is at the Richmond Theatre (19–28 March), then at the Grand Theatre, Leeds (31 March to 4 April), Theatre Royal, Bath (7–11 April), Theatre Royal, Nottingham (14–18 April) and the Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield (21–25 April). Othello is at the Oxford Playhouse until 28 February and at the Liverpool Playhouse (3–7 March).
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