Abstract
Originally scheduled to be performed at the Colibri Theatre for Children and Young Adults, the production of Tempête! was relocated to Nicolae Romanescu Park, where it took place at night, in an open-air amphitheatre with a capacity of 800. Director Irina Brook was eager to develop a relationship of proximity and complicity with a vast audience, on the model of Shakespearean popular theatre, and the raised proscenium stage of the Colibri might have been an obstacle. This change fitted the intention of the Festival’s newly appointed director, Ilarian Ştefănescu, to tighten the links with the city by bringing the theatre out of the walls of the institutional buildings as much as possible. Recently restored, this historic park had never been used as a venue for the Festival before the 2018 edition, when Much Ado About Nothing was performed there, only a few nights before Tempête!. Much frequented by families, the Romanescu Park provided an intergenerational audience, not all familiar with the codes and conventions of the theatre. Children were invited to sit at the front, on a carpet whose beige colour suggested a beach and as such extended the set representing the island, hyphenating stage and audience.
Brook’s production engaged the spectators in a cheerful Shakespearean universe reshaped specially for the young. The lack of the definite article in the title was a subtle hint that one was to watch a different approach to the well-known The Tempest. The director masterly wielded the original plot making it an understandable and attractive story for the youngest, as well as the not so young novice-to-Shakespeare spectators: the island became an Italian restaurant; Prospero (Renato Giuliani) was a chef and a playful magician; the tempest scene was a game in which Prospero, a puppeteer, played with a toy ship; Miranda (Irène Reva) and Ferdinand (Kevin Ferdjani) were two regular teenagers feeling excited about their reciprocated love; and the banquet was a boisterous disco party.
This energetic and festive production, which involved onstage cooking, paid tribute to Brook’s motherly, hospitable approach to theatre; conversely, it was instantly familiar to audiences well-seasoned in watching celebrity chefs cooking on TV shows. Combined with magic, cooking became a metaphor for anatomizing the theatre process, as the chef and magician blended a variety of ingredients to create illusions. The convivial atmosphere encouraged the spectators to (re)awaken a sense of wonder and give free rein to their imagination. Prospero used magic to control the natural phenomena, to set the toy ship instantly on fire or to make vegetables dance briskly round the kitchen. His magic powers made him omnipresent: even when not on stage, his presence could be felt through a menacing clap of thunder. Just as in fairy tales, when the king puts to the test his daughter’s suitors, Prospero tested Ferdinand’s skills to cook his signature pasta dish in order to decide whether he was worthy of marrying Miranda. The two lovers finally received not only Prospero’s consent but also his whisk – the token that they were now the heirs to his restaurant kingdom.
Right from the opening of the show, the tempest scene set the tone by focusing on artifice rather than realism, stimulating the audience to cooperate in the illusion. Sound and light effects evoked thunder and lightning. Fans blew winds in the huge white sails hanging from the flies. Ariel (Marjory Gesbert) and Miranda each grabbed a prop to suggest the effects of Prospero’s magic: Miranda opened up an umbrella playfully as if it was suddenly pouring down with rain and Ariel ran up and down the stage, waving a piece of blue fabric reminiscent of raging waves. Stage business induced a sort of dizziness, also evocative of the storm. This new version of the opening scene for the Craiova Festival differed from other performances since the show premiered in 2017 and toured in the Midsummer Festival of Hardelot in the North of France, at the National Theatre in Nice during the Shake-Nice! Festival, in Saint Petersburg’s Youth Festival and the Avignon Fringe Festival, among other places, as well as in many secondary schools in Nice and its surrounding area. It is emblematic of the versatility of Brook’s pocket production of The Tempest for the young actors of Nice National Theatre, and its capacity to adjust to a variety of contexts and venues.
Such adaptability, combined with a multicultural cast, Brook’s vision of theatre as a hospitable art and the European context of the Festival, accounted for the ethno-relativist approach that the audience experienced that night. Brook abandoned the traditional romantic approach and plotted not to take the audience to a remote setting, but to bring the island into the current effervescent multicultural landscape. As if designed under the ‘unity in diversity’ contemporary paradox, Tempête! framed the multi-layered dimension of interculturality from different angles. Although the play consisted of a modern re-interpretation of the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte, performed mainly in French – in a collective translation by Brook and her actors – yet interspersed with multilingual exchanges, the spectators did not feel abroad for a moment, whatever their nationalities and cultural backgrounds. They enjoyed in equal measure Prospero and Ferdinand’s English dialogues, the lyrical delivery of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18’ in French translation, Ariel’s sarcastic answers in Italian, Miranda’s Spanish accent and the few words she uttered in Romanian at an intensely romantic moment, to the local audience’s delight. The music of the show, too, was tuned to the same diversity-frequency to unify the interchanging rhythms and musical genres of opera scores, some 1980s famous Italian singles and recent American hip hop rhymes with the acrobatics and the magic tricks that shaped the performance. Prospero’s appellative Maestro validated the linguistic diachronic resourcefulness across cultures. Used as an anthroponym, Maestro played the multi-faceted leader as depicted within different cultural settings: a wizard, a distinguished classical music conductor, or a master chef. Zooming in, the spectators found other cultural artefacts adopted by globalized society: Ferdinand looked for his business card when introduced to Prospero and a yacht was awaiting the shipwrecked in the final scene. As the stage was flanked by two screens displaying surtitles in English and Romanian, some translation-related issues did not go unnoticed, such as the Toasting Prosecco, an Italian kulturem, was toned down to a mundane, neutral equivalent wine.
In spite of its ethno-relativist approach to the play, the production did raise the racial issue, colonization, slavery and freedom dramatized in the source-text – an aspect Brook chose not to tackle in a frontal way. In Tempête!, the island is the locus of a family crisis, all the characters being Prospero’s children: Miranda is his darling daughter, and so is Ariel in a way, whereas Caliban (Issam Kadichi) embodies the rebellious child, the misunderstood teenager. In this regard, Brook’s reading of Shakespeare’s play may well induce a generic slip from romance to comedy. Yet it seemed difficult to avoid the racial issue in the current European context in a production which cast the only Moroccan member of the company as Caliban. Brook has experimented with at least three different endings, using the final scene in the same way as the opening one, namely, as the play’s laboratory. In a former version, Prospero remained alone on the island, unable to leave it. In another one, he was joined by Caliban, who could not part with his master. In the version presented in Craiova’s Romanescu Park, all characters left the island together, in a movement of general reconciliation. Yet, as Caliban joined afterwards, on second thought, one could not but wonder about his change of mind. In what capacity would he go to Milan? If he joined as a free man, as Prospero suggested, why then did Caliban continue to call him Maestro, wear chains and remain clothed like a slave? Since Brook’s pocket production of The Tempest relied on doubling, and the same actors played Prospero and Stefano, Ariel and Antonio, Ferdinand and Trinculo, one also wondered whether Ariel or Antonio – or both? – left the island in the end.
The final image of all aboard setting sail for Italy could not but call to mind the current European migrant crisis, questioning the future in store for them, as well as the comic reading of the play. Just like its source-play, Tempête! resisted generic categorisation after all. Yet the creative energy and immense generosity exuding from the performance instilled in the theatre community a sense of cohesion and hope. That night under the stars in the Romanescu Park, Brook’s festive production celebrated the power of the theatre to bring together spectators of all ages and from all walks of life, and restore the organic bond with nature. There lay the real magic of Tempête!, a genuine instance of popular theatre in the Shakespearean sense of the term.