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Written by William Shakespeare - Audio book performed by Ian McKellen, Emilia Fox & full cast accompanied by classical music of the period - Recorded at RNIB Talking Book Studios, London - Dramatized Fiction - 2 COMPACT DISCS - 2 hours, 7 minutes

Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (November 2004)

Sir Ian McKellen, fresh from his performance as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is Prospero, and heads a strong cast in Shakespeare’s last great play.

The wronged duke raises a tempest to shipwreck his old opponents on his island so that he can ensure justice is done. With Emilia Fox as Miranda, Scott Handy in the pivotal role of the sprite Ariel and Ben Owukwe as Caliban, this new production directed by John Tydeman, balances the magic and the earthiness with music playing a key role.

The Tempest is the 10th Shakespeare play recorded in association with Cambridge University Press for Naxos AudioBooks, currently celebrating its 10th anniversary year. The series began with Hamlet (the title role taken by Anton Lesser) and includes Richard III with Kenneth Branagh. This year, fresh from playing another great magician, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Sir Ian McKellen came into the studio to play Prospero, joining an exceptional cast put together by the director John Tydeman. In a break he spoke to Nicolas Soames about his take on magicians old and new. He began by comparing the stage performance he gave four years ago with recording Prospero for audiobook.

Interview with Sir Ian McKellen:

‘I think there has been quite a positive tension between how I played Prospero on stage and here in the studio. The one big difference I suppose is that what you can do on stage is not necessarily what you can do on an audiobook recording. On stage, an actor can be doing one thing and saying something else whereas here, in the recording studio, you must be much clearer about what you are doing, so it is unambiguous.

So John Tydeman has been stressing certain qualities such as anger and passion, love or regard and gentleness. I think that makes the performance less complicated for me which is the right thing to do. It isn’t really a complicated play. The story is swift and unremarkable really except the forgiveness that takes place. It all happens very quickly.

It is satisfying at the end for the audience that everything is so neatly and certainly resolved. There is less ambiguity at the end of this play than there is at the end of most Shakespeare. Well there are some happy marriages, such as Beatrice and Benedick for example, which are probably doomed to failure, whereas Miranda and Ferdinand seem well matched and Prospero got it right as he gets most things right really.

When you look at Shakespeare’s characters you know that they live and breathe and make sense to us even through our modern perceptions of what reality is and what human nature is. Here is a man who rather neglected his job as head of state, was deposed in a coup and cruelly left to die in the company of his young daughter whom he miraculously saved. Miracles have continued because he controls the desert island on which he lives with the spirits there; and he has perhaps achieved a magnanimity and a humanity that he didn’t have when he was so resolved to be an academic. Those are the things which I find appealing about the character.

I was a little alarmed the other day when trying to escape into this studio from the impact of Gandalf who is everywhere in my life at the moment, to have John Tydeman call me The Wizard. Then I realized that he was not referring to Gandalf, he was referring to Prospero because Prospero too can be seen as a wizard. He certainly has many spells, magical powers and a magical robe though he gives up his abilities and gifts to achieve a humanity when he returns home after a long time in exile.

I doubt whether there is a similar resignation and understanding about what it is to be human that Gandalf feels at the end of his journeys when he goes home. Gandalf is not human. He takes on a human shape. He is an immortal. And at the end he goes sailing off to the Gray Havens which is one of the few places in Middle Earth which is not described by Tolkein. We are not meant to know what it is. Prospero, on the other hand, is going back to life to real life, to Milan, where he will now be head of state. So his new life is just beginning, but Gandalf’s is very much over.

On reflection, I think that the only similarity between Gandalf and Prospero is that I have played them both. I don’t really connect them!

Other members of the cast comment on their roles and the production:

Scott Handy – Ariel - Scott Handy has had a varied career, including spending a year with Peter Brook in Paris where he played Horatio in Hamlet. Among the directors he has worked with are Peter Greenaway on film and Declan Donnelan, touring Shakespeare with Cheek by Jowl.

‘It is quite challenging to do Ariel for an audiobook production. In a theatre production Ariel is very present in the play, but much of his role is as a witness – watching incidents and people – which is not possible on audio. He watches people fall in love, getting drunk, conniving and generally being normal, which for someone like Ariel, who is pure, is totally baffling.

‘For an audiobook recording, the vocal quality of Ariel is important. My natural voice is low but I raised it to give a more ethereal quality though John Tydeman, our director, wanted to Ariel to have a human presence. When I played it on stage at the RSC five years ago with David Calder as Prospero, we took a different approach – Ariel was more alien in style.’

Caliban - Ben Onwukwe - After a busy career as a full-time actor, Ben now divides his time between teaching English and drama in a London secondary school and acting.

‘I see Caliban as an early victim of colonialism. It’s Shakespeare’s 16th century view on how a colonial person would feel – that is what one becomes if people go on all the time about you being a slave.

‘The Tempest is a very special play. Shakespeare has dispensed with the subtleties. Everyone is very up front about what they feel and what they think. This is true for Caliban too.

‘It is much easier to portray him on stage because you have the visual medium. But he does have great poetry to speak. And although he is described as a monster we have to find a way of making him a real being who has feelings. That is the real challenge.’

Miranda - Emilia Fox - Emilia Fox, currently prominent on TV as well as on the London stage, has played two key Shakespearean roles for Naxos AudioBooks: Cordelia in King Lear (in the production with Paul Scofield in the title role) and now Miranda. She considers the two very different parts.

‘Miranda is an innocent about to experience the wonders of her life and is very open. She is so open, she doesn’t know how to hold back. On the other hand, Cordelia knows of the impurities of other people and is more cautious. She keeps back what she holds in her heart.

‘You have to hear the voice of these women in their different stages of life.

‘I have been very lucky with both my fathers. I knew Paul through family but I haven’t seen Ian since I was a young girl.

‘Working with actors like these is slightly nerve-wracking but in the end it is very rewarding and I can only say, ‘Please can I be an adopted daughter of both!’

Observations on 'The Tempest' by John Tydeman, director of the Naxos AudioBooks production:

When I was writing the synopsis of The Tempest for these notes it was enforcedly borne in upon me that the play, unlike all of Shakespeare’s other dramatic works, doesn’t really have a plot. It tells a story, it has events, it even has plots within it – Antonio and Sebastian plot to kill King Alonso and steal a brother’s crown; Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano plot to kill Prospero, establish Stephano as King of the island, with Miranda as his consort and the jester and the bully-monster as viceroys. Magic overcomes motive and has mastery over character.

It is magic which defines events, from the raising of the storm in the first act to the reconciliations of the last act and the promised marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda and the restoration of his Dukedom to Prospero. He tells us in narrative, after the dramatic and naturalistic-seeming shipwreck, the story of all that has happened in the past which really is the main action and the dramatic plot. From the moment we meet Prospero with Miranda in Act 1 Scene 2 he is in control of the present and we know that he can foresee the future after he has broken his staff (wand), buried his books and abandoned the practice of magic. Because of Prospero’s control over events and people there is no real danger, no dramatic conflict, just a progression of controlled happenings leading to a preordained conclusion.

Rarely for Elizabethan/Jacobean drama The Tempest observes the three classical Unities of Time (the events of the play occur within a limit of three to four hours); Place (the island); and Action (things happen continuously). One has some sympathy with the French critic who observed that “Shakespeare finally succeeded in preserving the Unity of Time only by eliminating action altogether.”

The Tempest, which is the last play Shakespeare wrote as sole author (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were collaborations with John Fletcher), differs from the rest of his dramatic work. To anyone familiar with the canon it just “feels” different. It has a different texture and symmetry. It aspires to the discipline of music and it is no accident that it has inspired numerous musicians – Beethoven, Purcell, Berlioz, Tippett and Tchaikovsky. At the time of his death Mozart was contemplating making it into an opera.

It has about it the qualities of a poem, a “sea-poem” some have called it. It has inspired numerous other works of art – W H Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, Milton’s Comus, Shelley’s Ariel to Miranda, Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos, Marina Warner’s novel Indigo. It has inspired films by David Jarman and Peter Greenaway – even the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet. Dryden and Davenant rewrote the original play, introducing new characters and a changed ending, and called their work The Enchanted Isle. It was in this form that The Tempest was played for over 150 years into the 19th century – and even afterwards many liberties were taken with the text.

That text was first published in the Folio edition of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and appeared as the first play in the volume. There were no problematic Quarto editions or pirate editions and we can be assured that the play comes down to us much as Shakespeare intended. Whether he actually meant the play to be taken as a kind of personal statement, as a sort of farewell to the theatre by the greatest poet-dramatist of the age (and of all time – but he wasn’t to know that!) is a moot point. Such was taken to be the case by sentimentalists for several centuries and there may well have been some such stirring in the creative subconscious of a successful man of the theatre who has made his money and wishes to retire to the country from the hurly-burly of London. I like to think so and can easily read such an intention into the script.

One fact is certain – the play is about a magus, a practitioner of magic, who says farewell to his Art. Shakespeare was certainly such a one.

The play is unlike any other of Shakespeare’s insofar as the story is concerned. It is a tale entirely of his own devising. All his other plays were adaptations of other people’s work, be they histories, romances, comedies or tragedies. He was to the theatre of his day what Andrew Davis is to television of today – a dramatiser. But The Tempest is special. It is original.

Of course there are references to the works of others – Ovid’s Metamorphosis in the 1567 Arthur Golding translation (which he dipped into for many of his works), Virgil’s Aeneid and John Florio’s translation of Montaignes Essays. Most interestingly and uniquely, the trigger for the play was an actual incident that occurred in 1609, accounts of which were published in 1610. A ship, the “Sea-Venturer,” under Sir William Gates, one of a small flotilla taking would-be colonists to the brave New World, was wrecked in the Bermudas and all aboard were considered lost. Then, months later, passengers and crew miraculously (it seemed) turned up on the coast of Virginia unscathed. This dates the writing of the play as being 1610/1611, for it was performed at court before James I on 1st November 1611 and later as part of the celebrations for the marriage of his daughter Princess Elizabeth in 1613.

The fact that it was always performed indoors affected the nature of the play’s form and structure. The masque, with much music and elaborate scenery, was the Jacobean fashion and The Tempest conformed to this fashion, which was more restrictive than the boundless space offered by the Elizabethan theatre in playhouses such as The Globe or The Rose.

This was also a period of much new colonisation, particularly in the Americas, and a considerable amount of debate on the subject was available in print. There is no doubt that someone such as Shakespeare was aware of the discussions and made reference to them in this play. Some have even suggested that the name “Caliban” is an anagram of ‘cannibal’.

Whilst The Tempest may be short on plot, in theme it follows the pre-occupations of Shakespeare’s last romance plays – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale. Vengeance turns to forgiveness, servitude to freedom, peace and reconciliation are all. The message is very much in line with Christian philosophy and teaching and all are given their freedom, even Prospero who frees himself.

But what of the actor trapped within his role? In the medium of sound alone he and the writer have fired the listener’s imagination, created visions within “the kingdom of the mind,” and the actors too, those spirits, need setting free. That is the request made by Shakespeare in the Epilogue when the “insubstantial pageant” has faded. Your indulgent approbation as audience creates its own form of liberation and whilst we may not be able to actually hear your response – we hope we will, somehow, sense it.