The Tempest is often set on a tropical island - what happened here?
They went badly wrong at Cyprus in our production and headed off gently towards Greenland! We've looked at setting the play, as hopefully you can see from the set, in the Arctic, or certainly an Arctic climate. And we took that decision based on all sorts of things. But we thought about what the island needs to provide. It needs to be somewhere that is harsh but still able to be beautiful, which we felt is true of this environment, depending on who's looking at it, and who you're looking at within that environment. So that was a key decision. It also needs to be somewhere where there is a truth to the magic, if you like, where we felt we could create a magical world that is both believable and truthful. So Philip Pullman's books, the Northern Lights books, set the Arctic as a very nice magic world for us, very kindly. Also the Northern Lights, and drawing slightly on Inuit shamanism and that culture has enabled us hopefully to create a truthful world of magic. Also the play is incredibly wandering - most of the scenes the characters are wandering from one location to another, which has a tendency really to defuse the drama, whereas in this environment it adds a quality to the drama, in that not only are they trying to find a reason for being on the island, they're fighting to survive on the island. So it ups the stakes there as well for us. We needed somewhere that had a use for logs, and had logs. They feature quite heavily, and actually the need for fire is very high in this kind of environment. And there's the overarching metaphor of Prospero and Prospero's emotional state, and the idea that he's been frozen away on an island for twelve years. There are an awful lot of references in the text to melting and softening, and there's that overarching kind of poetic image there as well. You're seeing a metaphor for Prospero's emotional state.
What decisions did you make about magic in this production?
I think it's key with any piece of work that deals with magic that you set bounds to the magic. You set limits to the special powers; otherwise the stakes in the entire play are incredibly low. So if, for example, Prospero's magic expands to being able to control time, there's absolutely no tension at all, because anything he gets wrong he can go back in time and do it again. You've got to be specific with the character choices, where does Prospero's magic lie? And where does Ariel's magic lie? The more we studied the text and looked for that, it seemed that Prospero's magic lay in almost Derren Brown-esque mind tricks, and being able to convince people of things, or falling asleep or whatever those moments were, hypnosis, whereas Ariel's magic is the stuff that really had the power. With Ariel's help, he oped graves. With Ariel's help he went, and got some dew from the Bermudas. Ariel can go to all these places; Prospero can't leave the island. Setting those rules was key, and I think it's fair to say Ariel is a Mephistopheles to Prospero. Prospero can do only crude magic, enough to release Ariel from a tree. But to take it much further Prospero doesn't have the power. And whether he has the power to control Ariel or not is questionable, I think. The more Ariel is potentially dangerous to Prospero, and is actually remaining in service because that's the work he's been given, as opposed to being bound by some magical force, the more dangerous that relationship becomes and the more potent.
Describe the music for this production and the instruments you use.
The instruments are quite fascinating. There's a real mixture of all different types of instrument. There's an awful lot of drums, there's a xylophone and the key thing is Mongolian throat-singing. That's not a sentence you say often, is it? We had a Mongolian throat-singer come into rehearsals and work with us, to look at that ability to use that quality of sound as an incantation and as a way of producing magic. It's this quality of sound that's kind of "eeeeeeohhhhnnnnn". But there's a quality of sound there that by the movement of the tongue in the mouth you can create harmonies within your head, and if you tune in and listen it's a bit like playing the bagpipes with your mouth. And we have a Mongolian throat-singer who also undertones, which is the very deep "gnnnohhhhnnnnn" sounds that sit behind things. Although Mongolia isn't quite the Arctic, the quality of sound seems to fit. We also make use of a crude version of Inuit language, Inuit consonants and vowel sounds, that we've combined into a song during the masque sequence. It becomes a very breathy, high-tempo song, almost chant-like. It's a very odd musical score.
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