The Tempest: Provocative but incomplete

Provocative but ultimately uninspiring, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was full of "incomplete gestures."

If memory serves, I borrowed this expression from one of my mentors, Robert Woodruff, years ago. Sometimes in art-making practice, audiences accept aesthetic choices that seem unjustified or erratic if the piece itself experiments with form in such a way that generally ignores or transcends traditional causal relationships. Robert – a director with a truly unique vision and no love of traditionalism in the theatre – encouraged formal innovation in his classroom but would never let us get away with what Homer Simpson describes as "weird for the sake of weird."

A play doesn't necessarily have to have a story, he told us, but it does require the evolution of an idea. The cause and effect relationships within a play need bear no resemblance to those of the outside world, but they do need to work together to build a world with internal logic, stakes and circumstances.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest poses many rich questions about the nature of power. From whence does power flow, and does its earned or unearned derivation affect how it should be used? How should one wield the power one possesses, and under what circumstances should one exert power over another? How does feeling powerful, or powerless, change the shape of your world?

Taymor is clearly drawn to the magnetism of these questions and how they relate to active identity markers in our current era. Casting Helen Mirren, a woman of approximately her own age and popular acclaim, in the role of Prospero (a role often considered the aging Shakespeare’s self-portrait) is an invitation to consider the state of the female artist, scholar, and culture-shaper today. But to what end? Mirren’s performance is strong, but feels shoehorned into an idea of Prospero that Taymor doesn’t relate to the rest of her production.

Her Caliban, played by Djimon Hounsou, is similarly problematic. Clearly West African in appearance, consistently half-naked and sometimes in chains, his character evokes the Atlantic slave trade. Prospero’s castle strongly resembles Elmina Castle, a slave-holding fort in Ghana where dehumanizing conditions were forced upon prisoners before they crossed through the “door of no return” onto slave ships. To what end? How does this idea evolve over the course of the play? Where does Caliban go when he exits the castle dramatically at the play’s end? I just hope he doesn’t end up in the colonies tending tobacco fields.

Slightly more successful but still incomplete is Taymor’s vision of the airy spirit Ariel. Played by a pale-painted Ben Whishaw, Ariel is, in this production, a genderqueer shape-shifter whose pectoral muscles sometimes soften into small breasts. In Ariel’s strongest and most frightening scene, s/he takes the form of a huge harpy, the angriest of female monsters. Are we to read Ariel-as-Harpy as the dangerous familiar of our female Prospero, who stakes a strong claim on traditionally masculine forms of power? Are we being asked to imagine gender as the cloven pine from whence this genderless creature dreams of escape? Once again the connections are almost there, but the internal logic doesn’t hold.

All of these gestures are promising but partial. As the time ticks by and the imperative of plot must be obeyed, the ideas contained in the bodies and costumes of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are dropped like unreturned serves on a tennis court. Of course, the film is not required to answer all the questions about race, gender, and sexual expression posed by both Shakespeare’s script and Taymor’s vision. Answers are boring! However, the practice of posing deep questions with rigorous engagement is vital. The incomplete nature of the otherwise interesting gestures disappointed at least this viewer, who hoped for a richer, more internally coherent and productive world.