Cheek By Jowl's The Tempest

11 April, 2011
by: Ricky PS

Cheek By Jowl's The Tempest takes what it likes from the text, imposes what it wills, and runs brilliantly.

I’ve never much liked The Tempest – too magical and macho – so I couldn’t explain why I forced myself to read it before Friday’s performance at the Barbican. But when the actors start talking in Russian, I feel very lucky, or telepathic, or well-disciplined by an unconscious memory.

And it really is rather “Russian”, with plenty of vodka, melancholy and shouting. The story of scheming aristocrats and slaves stranded on a desert island is at first merely inflected with gentle echoes of Tsarism, Socialist Realism, and post-Soviet oligarchy, but those echoes eventually give way to surreal screams. You wonder if the actors are perhaps just a little ashamed of the cartoon-Russia of Cheek By Jowl’s Director and Designer team Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod.

But it works. Partly because several superb performances stand up for themselves. Partly because Ormerod’s design is so simple, clear and engaging, with a stage of doors that open onto the mind of the supplanted Duke Prospero, a thrillingly cruel and depressive Igor Yasulovich. But principally, all the postmodern political fireworks succeed because The Tempest is itself already rather clever-clever. In this, Shakespeare’s final play, the wizard Prospero magically directs a cast of friends and enemies into the happy ending of his choice, before shedding his supernatural powers.

References to the failure of three successive Russian regimes to impose a political story echo what the acting shows, a truth rarely told about the bitter, manipulative Prospero: having lost his child and his magic, the happy ending isn’t his at all. In this refreshing production there’s a convincingly desperate and violent obsession between Prospero and his daughter Miranda, the animalistic Anya Khalilulina. But that quickly becomes a one-way street when she meets Yan Ilves’ subtly immature and arrogant Ferdinand.

Her other relationship entirely contradicts Shakespeare’s text. Although Donnellan retains those lines where Caliban admits to trying to rape Miranda, he makes the ogre-ish slave, Alexander Feklistov, into her surrogate mother. This makes a believable tragedy out of the final scene, in which all narrative strings must quickly tie together but after which Miranda will leave both her wild island life and Caliban. However, it reduces this character to a slap-stick fool, if a well-played one.

In most modern productions, Caliban is played as a cipher for oppressed colonial subjects. It was perverse for Donnellan to ignore this in a production where every relationship reproduces the pattern of a devoted but hateful slave and a disdainful but dependent master. The most masterful of these, Alonso, King of Naples, is often a silly simpleton. Here he’s played with compelling exhausted brutality by Mikhail Zhigalov.

Like the entire production, this recreation of the character takes what it likes from the text, imposes what it will, and runs. Unlike Prospero, or Lenin, Donnellan and his actors are in complete control of their story. Their wild, passionate performance is inspiring.