the tempest (d. declan donnellan)

Donnellan & Ormerod’s Tempest is an assured, convincing piece of stagecraft. Using a simple three door stage and occasional projections, they recount Shakespeare’s last play with fluency. There’s many details to savour. The five male Ariels (only 5?) torment the shipwrecked visitors with watering cans. Rather than carrying logs, Ferdinand carries an Ariel. When Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio are accused by Ariel, the projection turns the stage into a Soviet show trial. And the marriage ceremony becomes a paean to kitsch Soviet art, as sickle-wielding farmers line-dance across the stage.

However, in a sense the final two images hint at this production’s Achilles Heel. Cheek by Jowl is working with their sister Russian theatre company. Hence the director and designer’s decision to include various signifiers in their staging which announce a Russian influence, as above. We also get Stefano and Trinculo as materialist oligarchs, hellbent on shopping to oblivion. But the overall impact of these allusions is bitty. It’s unclear what exactly Donnellan is seeking to say about Russian society, or why he is matching this “Russianness” onto The Tempest. (One wonders what Pelevin would have to say.) Is there a deeper theme? Or is it just skilful appropriation of local imagery which goes hand-in-glove with working with a Russian company?

This question felt all the more curious watching the show in Latin America. The role of The Tempest in Latin American culture is well-documented. You’ll meet plenty of people called Ariel here (including the man who watches the cars on our street for pennies). There’s no reason for Donnellan’s staging to refer to this, (it only happens to be on tour here), but what’s apparent watching the play is the extent to which the writer was aware of and infiltrating his text with the geo-political developments of his day. On one level The Tempest can be seen a magical fairytale. But on another it’s a play which is addressing concrete, tangible issues. Donnellan’s use of ‘Russian’ imagery suggests an awareness of the way that the play maps onto a more discursive reading, but ultimately, to this observer at least, that interpretation failed to come through with any clarity.

Instead, the primacy of the magical fairy tale wins through. With regard to this, the director’s handling is deft. The advantages of having worked with Shakespeare’s texts all your working life, and the confidence this gives, is evident. Donnellan teases his audience like a sixth spritely Ariel, interrupting the action, setting up the denoument, in control at every moment. It makes for an enjoyable evening and a notable demonstration of the theatrical benefits of a director and their designer (Nick Ormerod) working as a unit, as they have done for thirty years.

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This is the third Cheek by Jowl Shakespeare I’ve seen (also one Webster). The first, Othello, was I believe, their first ever production, which toured to my school and I watched in the “drama barn” as a teenager. Ten years later, mas o menos, I saw Measure for Measure in the Sala Anglo, and went out for drinks with the cast in the Lobizon afterwards. It’s also worth noting that that Cheek By Jowl have had a unlikely but profound impact on my life, not for artistic reasons, but because a friend of mine once worked for them in their Kennington office. Where, one day, a fax arrived asking if the company knew of any young directors who might be interested in coming to work for a year in a place called Montevideo.

espía a una mujer que se mata (d daniel veronese)

The Argentinians have arrived in town. The Sala Muniz is sold out. The whole of my cast has come to see the show, and it seems as though collectively they know every single person in the audience.

Whilst the theatre seems to be bursting at the seams, a party due to break out at any moment, the stage itself, awaiting its actors, is a restricted, slightly ugly space, made out of plywood, a cheap set nestled within the theatre’s generous proportions. It’s diamond shaped, with a few old chairs and a table, on which sits an old revolver, with doors to either side and a small hatch in the back wall. An old man and a younger girl amble on. They start to talk, quietly, as though they weren’t in a theatre. Two faces spy on them through the hatch. The girl makes as if to threaten the old man with the gun, but he quietens her and takes it away, telling her they need to save it for the final scene.

Other characters appear. They are all drinking. One is called Vanya. I know this is an adaptation of Chekhov, but I can’t remember Uncle Vanya and anyway it doesn’t matter as the actors are talking about Ostrovsky and Genet and theatre, and there’s a hint of Pirandello, and the actors keep on drinking and all of a sudden they’re all roaring drunk, incapacitated, falling over each other, all of this taking place on their tiny handkerchief of a stage. And Sonya’s in love with the doctor who fancies Elena, who Vanya’s in love with only she’s not in love with either of them and she’s not even in love with her husband, Sonya’s father, Alexander, who was the old man at the start of the scene, but gradually all the connections start to make sense, like a whisky, natch, vodka dream, a night swimming, the characters gravitating round the space like fish in a bowl, a ceaseless fluid movement which seems more real than reality.

An Argentinian Chekhov, with all the unfulfilled dreams of the ever dreaming characters played out in some backwater where people speak as though they’re singing. The play reminded me a little of La Cienega, Lucretia Martel’s film, an old family holed up in its old house lost somewhere in the middle of a vast country. The Argentine dolefulness acting as a perfect foil to the Russian melancholy. A company so in tune with itself that it almost seems to deny the need for space, as though it could indeed perform the play in a nutshell, if the need arose.