Sydney Theatre Company’s butchery of The Tempest reveals how weak our commitment to difficult art has become

That classic work of the 1980s, The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, once had a competition for the most ridiculous credit, and determined it to come from the 1929 movie Taming of the Shrew: “By William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”.

Alas, it turned out to be likely apocryphal. But Sydney Theatre Company (STC) appears to have gone one better, offering its audience Shakespeare’s The Tempest as improved by STC artistic director Kip Williams and sundrie handes. The manner of the doing, and the way it’s being presented, says a great deal about the predicament of Australian high (i.e. middle brow) culture today.

Your correspondent hasn’t seen the production, and this is not a review of it as a performance. The acting and staging may well be excellent; with its strong cast it is very likely to be. This is instead a consideration of what happens when the forces of ideological conformity are so strong, and the commitment to art, with all its difficulties, so weak that the text created is self-serving kitsch and the very opposite of what was intended.

Almost every modern production of Shakespeare prunes a line or exchange here or there, for staging purposes. The STC has gone rather further. The Guardian‘s Steve Dow gives a neat summary, which I presume is accurate:

At first, audiences might not notice the numerous script cuts, but there are many: most significantly, Prospero’s worst insults of Caliban, with ‘filth’, ‘savage’, ‘misshapen knave’, ‘demi-devil’ and a ‘bastard’ who is ‘as disproportion’d in his manners / As in his shape’, are all deleted. The magician also no longer accuses Caliban of having sought to ‘violate / The honour of my child’, although he still considers Caliban a murderous conspirator.

Williams has interpolated many speeches from different Shakespeare plays in this production, most significantly stitching together an entire soliloquy for Caliban which begins by borrowing from Hamlet — ‘Within the book and volume of my brain’ – then segueing to Richard II’s ‘I weep for joy / To stand upon my kingdom once again’ — tweaked as ‘to sit upon my Country once again’ — before ending with part of Richard’s ‘hollow crown’ speech, changing ‘How can you say to me, I am a king’ to ‘How can you say to me, I am no man?’

The opening night audience applauded that soliloquy, Dow notes. I’ll bet they did, but let’s return to that.

There have been two broad periods when Shakespeare’s work has been mucked about with. From the late 17th into the mid 19th centuries, his work was used as a resource for popular theatre, turning out all sorts: Pericles and The Tempest as thrilling sea stories, forty-minute Hamlets, Midsummer Night’s Dream with characters from other plays brought in, and so on.

Shakespeare-as-written became dominant once again in the 1850s. Then, in the 20th century, radical stagings — Macbeth in Haiti, etc — began, and, more recently, carve-ups in which discontinuous parts of the works are slammed together.

The avant-garde cut-ups tend to make what they’ve done visible. The earlier tradition survives in productions such as the Australian Shakespeare Company’s current Melbourne outdoor Much Ado About Nothing, filled with pop music panto, etc. That’s fine too.

But the STC has done something else, because it’s essentially counterfeited Shakespeare, whacked in all sorts of bits and pieces from other plays, and then zipped the corpus back up again.

This isn’t The Tempest. It’s a pseudo-product, presented as if it were The Tempest. It thus appears to be Shakespeare as contemporary luvvies want him to be: someone whose language can be appreciated without having to acknowledge that his plays are either indifferent to (or enthusiastic about) cruelty, domination, sadistic violence, and the absence of justice in a benighted world — and that the power of the language resides, in part, in the harshness of the worldview.

One has to ask: how does an entire theatre company come to the point where they decide they want to stage a Shakespeare play but leave the most expressive language out? Such an absurdity appears to have come about because one particular interpretation of The Tempest — the post-colonial — has become an orthodoxy.

Thirty or 40 years ago it was noticed that The Tempest, having been hitherto interpreted as about art, love, family, the human condition, domination and dependence, could also be read in terms of the European colonisation of the Caribbean, well underway by the time the play was written around 1610. That sparked some great productions, and now many tedious ones, which cannot imagine any other interpretation of the play.

What other motive could there be for censoring Prospero’s words, and removing the stated principal motive for his cruelty — that Caliban had attempted to rape his daughter and populate the island with his own progeny — but that the play’s rewriters find the encounter so racist that they can’t bear to witness it, or show it to an audience, and essentially give it an occupational health and safety sensitivity edit?

The head spins, really. Everything is wrong with this approach. Even within the post-colonial approach, Shakespeare’s version of it is an unsparing picture of the master-slave relationship, in which the master continually reestablishes his humanity at the expense of the slave. Is there a better picture of the sort of attitude explorers and colonists took with them to the Americas? How is colonisation possible without systematic dehumanisation? So how on Earth is a witnessing to that improved by — and I can’t believe I’m typing this — making Prospero “kinder”?

The producers’ alteration appears to have missed the dialectical complexity of the relationship. Caliban gives as good as he gets in the Prospero-Caliban scenes. He resists as slaves resisted: not by anachronistic speeches about their abstract humanity, but through small acts of resistance in daily conduct.

The Prospero-Caliban scenes are brilliant expositions of the fact that such a relationship is never settled. The master’s dependence on the slave gives the slave a potential humanity that transcends the master’s. In that space, revolution begins. In Caliban, as actually written, one sees the prelude to Toussaint Louverture .

But beyond that, you don’t need to accept the near-compulsory post-colonial interpretation if you don’t want to. The island is clearly in the Mediterranean. Prospero is of Naples, Caliban is the son of Sycorax, a witch from Algiers. These are undecided identities. Does witch mean a non-human being? What is Caliban? Human? Half-human? Non-human?

There are many different ways to play these scenes if a director is doing their job rather than re-doing the one Shakespeare has already done. Indeed, they can be played for laughs, as boss and servant yoked together (the Prospero-Caliban exchange lies at the root of art as diverse as Beckett’s Endgame, and the old British sitcom Steptoe and Son). In accepting the racial interpretation as an orthodoxy, the STC has created a problem that isn’t there, and solved it by rewriting the play.

This is all ghastly. Some of it is too much even for The Guardian’s (excessively) generous Mr Dow: “I was less convinced when lines from the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene were added to the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand.”

Less convinced? That really is the full kitsch, isn’t it? That’s Shakespeare as Ye Merrie Theatre-Restaurant, with busty wenches bearing steins of XXXX before the schnitzel course. The STC has given us the east coast equivalent of Perth’s famous London Court, a half-timbered glory to take your gran.

What has gone so very wrong here that not only a theatre company but numerous critics believe you can slice up Shakespeare sentence-by-sentence and improve it? First it appears to be the triumph of morality over art among the progressive classes who form the makers and audience of the production. The cultural claim to importance of serious art is now so weak, and the demand of contemporary moralism so strong, that the latter shapes the former in ways it could not do if the people doing it still genuinely believed in the art. 

Of course, the idea that you can take these complete plays, widely seen as the greatest works in the world-canon, and improve them, has deeper roots. Wunderkind directors have always loved to do this (some of us have a sort of PTSD from too many student productions of this type — dear God let me never hear Rosalind sing “Surabaya Johnny” again), and have been emboldened in recent decades by various notions of the “death of the author”, and text as process.

But these are complete and composed works, whose parts work in relation to each other. Shakespeare is valued not just as a uniquely powerful poet, but as a builder of character and situation far beyond what others were capable of at the time and pretty much since.

Romeo and Juliet is inter alia about the emergence of the modern person — capable of falling in love — in the new close-quartered city. That’s why a balcony scene. What’s the point of it on an island with a population of 12? Richard II‘s “How can you say to me, I am a king?” comes at the end of a scene in act three, when Richard is coming apart and recomposing himself as a sovereign. It’s about the exact opposite of the sense of “country” this production is trying to invoke, and in any case they’ve only used part of the line. Is this all some sort of put-on?

The final, one-scene act would suggest so. In the actual version, Prospero returns to his Dukedom of Naples, which has always been his aim, and frees the airy Ariel from his spells — but not the earthy Caliban, whom he drives away with abuse. He must, to expel this memory of dependence and restore his aristocratic being.

In the STC version… well here’s Mr Dow again:

In the final act, Prospero, who in Shakespeare’s text dismisses Caliban without any attempt at rapprochement, instead addresses him with a mashup of Hamlet and Richard II, beginning, ‘Give me your pardon sir, I have done you wrong’.

I. Can’t. Even. Nothing in the play, the actual play, creates the conditions for such. That’s just reducing Shakespeare to bad, arbitrary, writing. Deus ex mashup.

It is not merely the producers who lack the faith in serious art to defend it. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has given a full-throated roar to say what an absolute travesty this is (though there have been partial criticisms in the ABR and The Conversation).

Travesty’s a clue, an old genre, in which companies did short muck-up versions of the tragedies they were playing. Is the aim to reduce Shakespeare to a word bank? To destroy its interior character as a blow against the presumptions of European high culture? It’s a less crazy argument than that they were trying to honour the work.

The kicker of it all is that if the STC was trying to strike some sort of blow against colonialism, it has done the exact opposite, simply reinscribed it. Like a host of other “please like us, we’re not bad people” works — Australia, the Baz Luhrmann dreck, and Jindabyne, being two examples — the purpose and effect of the script of this new Tempest appear to be to make white colonialists out as nice people.

They let their slaves give soliloquies asserting their humanity, rather than beating them into the earth. They apologise to them at the end of it all! Colonialism never happened! It was all a spell, a dream, solved by an apology. How can you possibly present the centuries of beating down, the virtual impossibility of resistance with this self-serving confection?

What the STC has indulged in is a version of the third type of Shakespeare editing: Bowdlerism, the 19th-century removal of much of the plays’ sexual content, which above all affirmed the sanctity of the family, over which Shakespeare cast a keen and unsettling eye.

The Victorians (some of them) couldn’t venerate Shakespeare — by now a property of Englishness — and reconcile his portrayal of the raw lust that drove men and women with a sentimental idea of romance. Thus, Bowdler turns Ophelia’s suicide into an accident, thus removing a proto-feminist point: that she is making the ultimate act to resist a life of imposed femininity. 

Similarly, today’s progressive culturati can’t venerate Shakespeare — as a marker of elite high culture — and look his views of power and right in the face. That’s even when its critical aspect is so close to the surface.

It’s always a mistake to guess Shakespeare’s intentions. But our sense of his cool critical intelligence is buttressed by the fact that he has a character describe Caliban as “marketable” in the final act. Caliban’s subsequent refusal to recognise him is essential to that. If you’re going to do the “colonial” thing, surely this scene as written suggests that the slavery of the old, classical world is about to start all over again in the new one? Why silence that critical point?

If that’s really where you go… well, if you can’t take The Tempest as is and either express the colonial critique or render it otherwise — so that the racial insult is removed — then maybe theatre directing isn’t for you.

This is sutured together spectacle, serving progressive ideology and self-regard, and judging by the listing on the website, actually misrepresenting the resulting farrago as Shakespeare’s work.

No wonder the audience applauds a codded-up speech rendered in anachronistic, liberal-humanist pieties. No doubt it is partly in tribute to the performance, but it is also the audience become Prospero, and with their own applause, releasing themselves from the difficult questions about art, power and history that the play presents.

How much better would it have been to take the money and give it to a First Nations writer to reimagine The Tempest story — and simultaneously stage a zero-budget jeans and t-shirts version of the original in a smaller theatre, so those of us who want to can see the actual play?

But, quelle horreur! What role then for the white magician, with his cut-and-paste spells and his additional dialogue?