Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

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СКАЧАТЬ account in which he says, for example, “I can’t remember anything more moving, for me as a producer, than Oberon crying because he’s 10 and he has a problem with his lines. It was so touching because he meant to do it, he was really upset because he had mixed up some lines and wanted to do it again. The depth of genuine desire to do it, the lack of any cynicism about it, was so touching and heart-breaking.”³¹ He also described learning something about children.

      Children don’t act. Acting is a grown-up thing. Acting requires experience, self-knowledge, self-awareness, all manner of tricks and skills, “turnings and windings.” But children play. They play at being someone else, a character. And that requires honesty, great earnestness and intense faith. It requires believing in what you are playing totally. An actor who ceases to believe in the character he portrays can get by through habit and devices. A child who ceases to believe in what he or she plays just stops. The thing ceases to exist. The child who plays, sees, hears, feels the character and the action. The actor sees, hears, feels himself in the character, engaged in the action. Actors have skill, technique; actors are artists. Children who play are rough and clumsy, awkward. Actors embellish. Children who play speak plain and rush to the point. Actors take themselves seriously. The children take the play seriously. And we should take the children seriously. For here, the play comes first. And what a play!

      And that defines well enough what is so unsatisfactory about this film. That concluding play on the word play is as clumsy as he says the children are (and it does not work in languages other than English). Watching children play can be fun, the more so perhaps if they are one’s own. But after a while, quite a short while, one begins to wish they could act. They try hard and enjoy themselves, but that is not enough.

      THE JARMAN TEMPEST

      In a 1987 Institute of Cultural Arts interview with Simon Field,³² Derek Jarman said that he was fascinated by magic as a way to identify a suppressed or subterranean tendency, and thus for him, as earlier for Lindsay Kemp, it was the obvious way to represent the homosexuality that he takes to be clearly evident in much Renaissance drama, particularly in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, of which Jarman produced a widely praised film, and The Tempest. Prior to starting on his film of The Tempest (1979), he made a study of John Dee, who is a constant point of reference for commentators on Prospero. Stimulated by the pioneering work of Frances Yates, both Frank Kermode in his Arden edition and Stephen Orgel in his Oxford edition made much of the connections to Dee,³³ but Jarman added the link with homosexuality. The relation between Prospero and Ariel, with its evident sexual undertones, is central to the film, and Ariel’s subservience to the magus may be seen as an allegory of the political repression Jarman knew to be the way the state system worked in the early modern period. Ariel is Prospero’s spy and brings back to his master the information Prospero needs to keep his power.³⁴

      In the film Jarman uses several magic tricks.³⁵ He might have actually seen the 1908 silent film discussed at the beginning of this chapter, since his characters emerge from the sea in the same way, though against a blue rather than a black-and-white background, echoing the realistic Lumière mode. But when Prospero (Heathcote Williams) tells Miranda (Toyah Wilcox) her history, though he begins by simply talking to her on-screen, in intimate dialogue, suddenly, when he wants to show her how she was when they were all still in Milan, he brings out a mirror with a long pole attached, eerily like a selfie-stick (though they were some years in the future). Miranda looks into it, and immediately the screen is filled with what she sees. It is her past as a child, and we see it as she does.³⁶ It is a brightly colored memory of childhood, but she is present and indeed central to the series of images, so it is not intended as a dream sequence. This is the magic mirror of filmed fairy tale. It is also a mise-en-abyme of the film process, which gets a thorough revision: images from documentaries are mixed with those of the plot. As we move from room to room in the interior of the large house that replaces the play’s island, we are likely to lose our bearings. Visual tableaux are filmed in front of a largely unmoving camera in an echo of the way cinema got started.

      Near the end, at the moment when Prospero sends Ariel (Karl Johnson) off to fetch the sleeping crew from the ship, we have a joke about the film magic. Ariel goes to the door, indicating he will do it in a trice, but finds he cannot open the big heavy door. He turns, opens his arms as for a demonstration, and disappears in a Méliès-like stop-camera moment. The next scene is the memorable dance of the sailors (with obvious reference to the homosexual “Hello, sailor” tradition). The film suddenly turns into Derek Jarman’s version of Kiss Me Kate (itself a gay icon), or West Side Story—and so it becomes The Tempest, the Musical. And there follows what has become a famous piece of cinematic camp, Elisabeth Welch leading the sailors’ chorus in “Stormy Weather.”

      At the end of the film, while Prospero snoozes in a chair (perhaps it was all just his dream), Ariel briefly sits on Prospero’s “throne,” triumphant finally in the struggle with his master. He then obtains his freedom by sneaking out past the dreaming figure. He tiptoes past, climbs the stair, and vanishes, while on the soundtrack we hear the beating of wings flying off. The scene, as in much of the film, takes place in a grandly furnished interior (Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, dilapidated at the time but since restored) that contrasts markedly with this sudden intrusion of screen magic. Prospero continues to sleep, now in close-up, as “Our revels now are ended” plays on the soundtrack. But does this final speech (moved, as often occurs, from the conclusion of the masque to the end of the play) confirm Prospero’s lingering control over the magic or return it to the film director? In any case, the main message continues to be the closet relation of gay sexuality and magic, since Ariel is signaled very clearly to the audience as an attractive young male, mischievous, even giggly. He delights in being able to creep away unnoticed by authority and finally to use his own magic abilities, no longer in the service of Prospero.

      THE TAYMOR TEMPEST

      Julie Taymor’s wild The Tempest has gone as far as one could wish into the possibilities of doing Shakespearean magic on film.³⁷ Released in the summer of 2010, it became the centerpiece of the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Helen Mirren apparently had little trouble convincing Taymor that the magician could be played by a woman. A few interpolations in the backstory explain that Prospera’s exile with her daughter was forced upon her through accusations of witchcraft arising from her intense study of alchemy, which enables her “rough magic” on the isle. Her anger at her enemies is maternal, stemming as much from a desire to protect Miranda as from her need for revenge. The result is Prospera. Taymor had done a minimalist stage Tempest in 1986, but a visit to Hawaii convinced her to make a film: in the supplementary material on the DVD she says that the combination of volcanic black and red rock, strikingly visual cliffs, and wild weather made it seem to her “as if some supernatural events had taken place there.” The film opens on a close-up—within a background of land, sea, and sky—of a castle made from black sand. As the shot widens, we see that the building is dissolving in the rain and in fact is a miniature castle held in Miranda’s hand. Thunder and lightning crackle out over the immense sea, and we/she hear the frightened shouting of the crew of the ship that seems to be foundering in the bay below. The scene is brilliantly beautiful, the product of Prospera’s magic, as she soon explains, but also of CGI. Computer-generated images allow these two women, magician and film director, to make rich and densely powerful versions of their illusions.

      The purpose of the masque, which is to show “some vanity” of Prospero’s art (4.1.41), can now be gloriously fulfilled: as Antonio Sanna puts it in the online Kinema article, “[S]tar maps are drawn, various geometrical shapes and the symbols of the zodiac signs are continually superimposed over real stars and nebulae in a sort of representation of a cartographer’s reverie.” The masque is, nonetheless, a vain demonstration of Prospera’s power. Ben Whishaw’s Ariel alternately appears from a white dove and an orchid, and as Sanna puts it “is symmetrically duplicated or exponentially replicated”; Whishaw does not simply evoke the spirits but participates in the magic vision him/herself.

      Prospero’s СКАЧАТЬ