Such stuff as dreams are made on: Bell Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Written in 1612, The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last solo-authored play, and has been read (perhaps inaccurately) as a valediction to the theatre. This Tempest – John Bell’s twenty-fifth anniversary production for Bell Shakespeare, and his last as artistic director – could also be read as a valediction to the theatre as much as to the company that bears his name, but that would be to do this production a disservice. Here, on Bell’s island – on the set, as much as in an imaginary space – I am certain magic was worked, and this is a colourful, poignant, and fitting way to sign off from his company.

Dreams are toys: Bell Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Written late in his career, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is perhaps one of the stranger of his plays to wrap your head around. Essentially comprising of two very disparate genres – heightened tragedy c. Othello, and bawdy pastoral comedy c. As You Like It – it, today, works on an emotional level more than a dramatic level, and pushes the boundaries of what is possible on stage, both in the Elizabethan theatres and on contemporary stages. Deriving its title from the Elizabethan storytelling mode reminiscent of a fairytale, The Winter’s Tale is classified as one of the Romances by twenty-first century critics. While the term ‘Romance’ derives from the Greek stories from the second and third centuries AD, these stories were, for the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, merely continuations in a rich vein of storytelling; usually episodic, they utilised the processional ‘quest’ motif, and generally involved perilous journeys and final (impossible) recognitions and reunions.

Presented here by Bell Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s less performed plays throughout the world, perhaps because of its stylistic confusion. Directed with warmth and colour by John Bell, this production is enchantingly set inside a child’s bedroom, that of Mamillius, the son of Leontes, King of Sicily. Created out of white curtains, a white bed, and white floor, the austerity and winteriness of its design gives way to gorgeous washes of colour, deep blues and purples, vibrant pinks and yellows and ceruleans. The story unfolds very much from Mamillius’ point of view, yet for all its ingenuity and enchanting cleverness, something doesn’t quite sit right with this production.

All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s Romances as restoratives

Thou met’st with things dying,
I with things newborn.

Old Shepherd, The Winter’s Tale (III.3)

I.

Of the four genres that Shakespeare’s plays can be broken into, it is the final group that is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood. Yet it is this very same group that perhaps holds the keys to unlocking the humanism at the heart of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. These four plays, the ‘Romances’ – comprising Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – are generally believed to have been written between 1608 and 1612. When viewed together, they form a valediction to one of the most consistently human and moving bodies of work in the modern-English literature canon, and are characterised by their almost fairytale-like plots and structures, and almost-absurdly contrived turns of events that carry them from one incredible scene to the next. Read as a progressive series of Chinese boxes, this quartet (or quintet, as I shall suggest) forms a coda to the plays, poems and sonnets that have come before them. There is a restoration of balance at their heart, a distinct sense of regaining an inherent aesthetic equilibrium, one that sets out to right wrongs; like Prospero at the conclusion of The Tempest, they seem to be asking readers and audiences alike, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.”

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

O, is all forgot?

All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

Preamble: People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for ever, for the simple reason that as we go through life, so too do our tastes change; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us.

By my own admission, while I am a Shakespeare tragic, a bardolater if you will (I used to joke I had Bard flu), and have been for a number of years (since Year Twelve, if it matters), but it’s only quite a recent thing for me, if we talk about the passion and drive, the underlying connection to his oeuvre. Before that time, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still… I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Okay, yes, Mum and Dad took me to see ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)’ when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to.

But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of favourite Shakespeare plays, whether we like it or not, is actually a part of our education. Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle, more conscious, than we’d ever assumed at first.