Are our revels about to end?

On Valentine's Day my wonderful wife gave me a card. This was unusual. Not just because we don't usually do Valentine's Day stuff, but because in it was the promise of an overnight in Stratford on Avon to see the RSC production of the Tempest which ends tonight. She had conspired with my PA to reschedule my meetings and spirit me away for 36 hours on Thursday and Friday of this week as a wee pick-me-up. We usually head off for a day or two at least the week after the 4 Corners Festival, but that wasn't possible this year because I had some work meetings and deadlines that week, and Sally had to go visit her mum in Scotland. So this little sojourn was very welcome. Doubly so because it was a surprise. Trebly so because The Tempest was the first Shakespeare play I ever performed in, nearly 43 years ago, and so it holds a special place in my heart, despite being one of the Bard's less accessible pieces.

I deliberately didn't read any of the reviews of the show once I knew we were going, but had picked up some of the predictably reactionary foaming at the mouth in some quarters at this "woke" production with Alex Kingston as a female Prospero (all I will say now is that she was superb - but I will return to her performance again), and a climate crisis meta-narrative. Why not, I thought, with a play that begins with a man- (or in this case, woman-) made weather catastrophe?

The programme probably overplayed the "green-book"/sustainability credentials of the show and the RSC going forward - welcome to the world of other less subsidised theatre companies that have always re-used, recycled and sustainably sourced props and costumes! But the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the design, and embedding it relatively comfortably into the original text without much violence to it, shifted the focus from this only being a personal, or at broadest a political drama affecting obscure renaissance Italian city states, to one that speaks into the current global existential crisis. 

They did radically alter the masque of blessing by the 3 Roman Goddesses, removing, among others, the line "Great Juno comes; I know her by her gait", which was often a source of hilarity among catty cast-members, if not with audiences. Instead they turned it into a neo-pagan blessing of Miranda and Ferdinand's unlikely instant romance, painting a picture of a future where the next generation could look forward to harmony between them and with a bountiful, beautiful creation.

But immediately after that with the dancing and singing spirits dispersed, Prospero descends into despair. The following speech is the beginnings of a blurring between what is happening on the stage and what is going on in the "real" world, a trajectory completed with Prospero's closing Epilogue. Most have seen it as a nod by the author of his coming retirement, and with that in mind most deliveries of these two speeches come across as a theatrical swansong, particularly when performed by some aging leading male actor who had played all the Shakespearean heroes in his time and now only has Prospero and Lear left open to them, before they start sliding down the pecking order into character parts. This usually makes these speeches poignant. 

But delivered here, by a wonderful woman who hopefully has many  other stage roles to come, against the background of the production's climate crisis theme, the interface between dramatic artifice and global reality is again blurred. However this time it didn't just coax a tear out of my eye at the waning of a great talent, but genuinely reducing me to a weeping wreck at the reality of existential threat through a man-made climate and environmental catastrophe. In a week where the founder of the Green Party suggested that it is now too late to avert widespread environmental collapse, perhaps the "revels" of the wealthy west will soon end, and all that we have erected, including the "cloud capped towers" will fade away...

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Further reflections from this "comedy" to come when I find time... but perhaps our time, and not just mine, is running out

Selah