Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Sound and fury | 7 April 2016

Compton Verney’s Shakespeare in Art show is all but ruined by the ambient sounds – visit instead its small but superb companion exhibition Boydell’s Vision

There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries — about the British Museum’s decision to play Pan-pipe music into its exhibition Celts: Art and Identity. Did the gold torcs and coin hoards sparkle the more for the looped song of Pan-pipes? Not really, and it didn’t half annoy visitors.

Not put off by the British Museum’s Pan-pipe complaints, Compton Verney in Warwickshire has been at the jukebox for its Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy. The exhibition takes Caliban’s ‘the isle is full of noises’ literally, giving us wishy-washy wave sounds and shiver-me-timbers deck-creaking for The Tempest, recordings of Ophelia’s mad, mournful singing and Gertrude’s ‘there is a willow grows’ speech for Hamlet, chirruping birds for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and plingy-plangent lute music for the history plays. In one unfortunate spot you hear birds, Gertrude and lute all together. In the ambient-music business this is known as ‘sound bleed’.

These competing noises do great disservice to the art. If Henry Fuseli is any good at theatrical painting — and at his best he is the most marvellous old 18th-century ham — he doesn’t need musical accompaniment, nor a special lighting machine spinning misty ‘blasted heath’ effects around the gallery. While Fuseli may not be a perfect technician — close-up his paintings have a rapid, unfinished quality — he knew how to do drama. His tight claustrophobic portrait of the ‘The Three Witches’ (1782) has the oppressive closeness of a nightmare, while his ‘Macbeth, Banquo and Witches on the Heath’ (1794) imagines the returning army as bleached, spectral and more dead than alive. The two commanders are tense and battle-shattered, stiffened to bronze and stone in their fright at the witches.

The exhibition, staged to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, is billed as presenting ‘artistic responses’ to his most popular plays.

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